LIBRARY
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA BARBARA
PRESENTED BY
MRS. J. M. DILLMAN
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The^ook of History
H Ibistor^ of all IRations
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PRESENT
WITH OVER 8000 ILLUSTRATIONS
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
VISCOUNT BRYCE, p.c. d.c.l., ll.d., f.r.s.
CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS
W. M. Flinders Petrie, LL.D., F.R.S.
UNIVKRSITY COLT.KCK, LONDON
Hans F. Helmolt, Ph.D.
EDITOR, GERMAN "HISTORY OF THE WORLD"
Stanley Lane-Poole, M.A., Litt.D.
TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN
Robert Nisbet Bain
ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN, BRITISH MUSEUM
Hugo Winckler, Ph.D.
UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN
Archibald H. Sayce, D.Litt., LL.D.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY
Alfred Russel Wallace, LL.D., F.R.S.
AUTHOR, "MAN'S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE"
Holland Thompson, Ph.D.
THE COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
W. Stewart Wallace, M.A.
UNIVERSITY i)V TORONTO
Maurice Maeterlinck
ESSAYIST, POET, PHILOSOPHER
Dr. Emile J. Dillon
UNIVERSITY OF ST. PETERSBURG
Arthur Mee
EDirOK, "IHE ROOK OF KNOWLEDGE"
Sir Harry H. Johnston, K.C.B., D.Sc.
LA IE COMMISSIONER FOR UGANDA
Johannes Ranke
UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH
Sir William Lee- Warner, K.C.S.I. K. G. Brandis, Ph.D.
MEMBER OF COUNCIL OF INDIA UNIVERSITY OF JENA
And many other Specialists
Volume I
MAN AND THE UNIVERSE
The World before History
The Great Steps in Man's Development
Birth of Civilisation and the Grow^th of Races
Making of Nations and the Influence of Nature
JAPAN
The Country and the People
NEW YORK . . THE GROLIER SOCIETY
LONDON . THE EDUCATIONAL BOOK CO.
EDITORIAL AND CONTRIBUTING STAFF
OF
THE BOOK OF HISTORY
Bt. Hon. Viscount Bryce, F.B.S.
Formerly British Ambassador to the United
States, Author of " The American Com-
monwealth "
Professor i:. Bay Iiankester, F.B.S.
President British Association, 1906-7; I'ast Di-
rector of South Kensington Museum of
Natural History
Dr. Alfred Bussel Wallace, F.B.S.
Co-discoverer with Darwin of the Theory of Nat-
ural Selection; Author of "Man's Place
in the Universe "
Dr. William Johnson SoUas, F.B.S.
Professor of Geology at Oxford University
Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, F.B.S.
Professor of Egyptology, University College,
London; Founder of British School of
Archaeology in Egypt
Professor Wm. Boyd Dawkins, F.B.S.
Professor of Geology at Victoria University,
Manchester; Author of " Early Man in Britain
Frederic Harrison, U.A.
Hon. Fellow and formerly Tutor of Wadham
College, Oxford; Vice-President of the
Royal Historical Society
Dr. Archibald H. Sayce
Professor of Assyriology at Oxford University
Sir Harry H. Johnston, X.C.B.
Doctor of Science of Cambridge University; late
Commissioner and Consul-Gencral for Uganda
Dr. J. Holland Bose
Cambridge University Lecturer on Modern His-
tory ; Author of " Development of the
European Nations "
Dr. Stanley Iiane-Foole
Professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin
Sir John Knox Iiangrhton
Professor of Modern History at King's College,
London University; Editor of Lord
Nelson's Despatches
Oscar BrowningTi M.A.
Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; University
Lecturer in History
Professor Bonald M. Burrows
Professor of Greek at University College of South
Wales ; Author of " Discoveries in Crete
David Qeorg-e Hogfarth, M.A.
Director of Cretan Exploration Fund and Past
Director of the British School at Athens
Herbert Paul, M.P.
Author of "A History of Modern England"
Sir Bobert K. Douglas
Professor of Chinese at King's College, University
of London ; late Keeper of Oriental
Books, British Museum
Dr. Hugro Winckler
Professor of History and Oriental Languages at
the University of Berlin
Sir William lee-Warner, K.C.S.I.
Member of the Council of India; Formerly
Scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge
Dr. B. J. Dillon
Author and Journalist; Master of Oriental Lan-
guages at "the University of St. Petersburg
William Bomaine Paterson, M.A.
Author of " The Nemesis of Nations "
W. Warde Fowler, M.A.
Scholar and Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford;
Author of " The City- State of the Greeks
and Romans "
Dr. H. F. Helmolt
Author of " German History " and Editor of
the German " History of the World "
Professor Xonrad Haebler
Of the Imperial Library of Berlin
Professor Bichard Mayr
Of the Vienna Academy of Commerce
Arthur Mee
Editor of The Book of Knowledge.
Professor Budolf Scala
Of the Imperial University of Vienna
Professor Karl Weule
Director of the Leipzig Museum of Anthropology
Professor Wilhelm Walther
Of the University of Rostock
Arthur Christopher Benson, M.A.
Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge ; Editor
of The Correspondence of Oueen \ ictoria
Major Martin Hume
Lecturer in Spanish History and Literature at
Pembroke College, Cambridge
Bobert Nisbet Bain
Traveller and Historian; Assistant Librarian at
the British Museum
Bichard Whiteingf
Author of " The Life of Paris "
His Excellency Max von Brandt
Ex-German Ambassador to China and Minister in
Japan
Francis H. Skrine
Traveller and Explorer; late of the Indian Civil
Service
Holland Thompson, Ph. D.
The College of the City of New York.
Dr. Archdall Beid, F.B.S.B.
Author of " The Principles of Heredity "
Arthur Di6sy
Founder of the Japan Society ; Author of "The
New Far East
Dr. X. G. Brandls
Director of the University Libraries at Jena
Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.Ii.
Author of " A I'olitical History of England "
Professor Joseph Xohler
Professor of Jurisprudence at Berlin University
Angus Hamilton
Traveller and Correspondent in the Far East;
Author of " Afghanistan "
J. G. D. Campbell, M.A.
Late Educational Adviser to the Government of
Siam
W. B. Carles, C.M.G.
Geographer; late British Consul at Tientsin,
China
Professor Johannes Banke
Professor of Anthropology, Physiology, and Nat-
ural History at Munich
W. S. Wallace, M. A.
University of Toronto.
Hon. Bernhard B. Wise
Scholar of Queen's College, Oxford: Ex-Attor-
ney-General of New South Wales
H. W. C. Davis, M.A.
Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford
CONTENTS OF VOLUME I
THE SAURIAN AGE .
FRONTISPIECE
FIRST GRAND DIVISION
MAN AND THE UNIVERSE
Editorial Introduction
Plan of the History
Plan of First Grand Division
A View across the Ages
Summary of World History
Chronology of 10,000 Years
Time-table of the Nations .
Contemporary Figures in History
The Beginning of the Earth
Four Periods of the Earth's Development
Geological Clock of the World's Life
Hov/ Life became possible on Earth
Scene from the Prehistoric World
Beginning of Life on the Earth
How Man obtained Mastery of the Earth
THE WORLD BEFORE HISTORY
Prehistoric Man attacking Cave Bears
The Wonderful Story of Drift Man
The Appearance of Man on the Earth
Life of Man in the Stone Age
Primitive Man in the Past and Present
The Home Life of Primitive Folk .
When History was dawning
THE GREAT STEPS IN MAN'S DEVELOPMENT
The Material Progress of Mankind
Beginnings of Commerce . • • • •
The Higher Progress of Mankind , . . •
BIRTH OF CIVILISATION AND GROWTH OF RACES
Seven Wonders of Ancient Civilisation
Rise of Civihsation in Egypt . . . •
Rise of Civihsation in Mesopotamia
PAI'.F.
I
3
6
7
60
.61
74
■ 78
79
89
90
91
Plate facing 96
99
. 108
Plate facing 114
115
127
132
145
164
175
Plate facing 192
. 203
225
233
259
THE BOOK OF HISTORY
PAGE
Rise of Civilisation in Europe ......... 281
The Triumph of Race 299
Alphabet of the World's Races 311
Little Gallery of Races 2^3
Types of the Chief Races of Mankind ........ 349
Ethnological Chart of the Human Race ....... 352
MAKING OF NATIONS AND THE INFLUENCE OF NATURE
Birth and Growth of Nations
Land and Water and Greatness of Peoples
Environment and the Life of Nations
The Size and Power of Nations
The Future History of Man
353
377
387
399
404
SECOND GRAND DIVISION
THE FAR EAST
Map of the Far East . . . .
Plan of the Second Grand Division
Interest and Importance of the Far East
406
408
409
JAPAN
COUNTRY AND PEOPLE
Great Dates in Japan
The Empire of the Eastern Seas
Map of Japan
Qualities of the Japanese People
416
417
432
433
VI
LIST OF SPECIAL PLATES IN THE
BOOK OF HISTORY
The Saurian Age .......
Scene from the Prehistoric World: Early Ice Age
Prehistoric Men Attacking the Great Cave Bears
The Beginnings of Commerce
Carrying Off an Emperor
Buddha, " The Light of Asia "
Four Famous Figures in Chinese History
The Colour of India ....
Gems of Indian Architecture .
Indian Temples .....
Nineveh in the Days of Assyria's Ascendan
Two Indian Scenes ....
Spring Carnival at a Tibetan Monastery
The Pyramids of Abusir
Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans
Palace of an Assyrian King .
The Sphinx ..•••.
Alexander, the World Conqueror .
The Acropolis of Athens
An Arab Storyteller ....
Theodora, the Byzantine Empress
Glimpse of the Life in a Turkish Harem
Primitive Justice .....
Thaddeus Reyten at the Diet of Warsaw
Roland .......
Prince Arthur and Hubert
Venerable Bede Dictating His Translation of
"The Vigil": A Knight of the Middle Ages
Alfred, the Hero King of England .
King John Granting Magna Charta
Crusaders Sighting Jerusalem
Wolsey's Last Interview with Henry VIII
Charles I on His Way to Execution
Charles II Visiting Wren
Napoleon the Great ....
" Peace with Honour " .
The French Soldiers' Unrealised Dream of V
Recessional ......
The Conqueror's Gift to London
King Edward VII
Clio, " The Muse of History "...
Flags that Fly in the Four Winds of Heaven
Statue of Liberty ......
Hope ........
the Gospel of St
tory
PAGE
Frontispiece, Vol. i
Facing 96
114
192
Frontispiece, Vol. 2
Facing 562
754
Frontispiece, Vol. 3
. Facing 1154
" 1 196
Frontispiece, Vol. 4
. Facing 1364
1436
Frontispiece, Vol. 5
. Facing i860
1956
. " 1996
Frontispiece, Vol. 6
Facing 2504
Frontispiece, Vol. 7
Facing 2906
2994
Frontispiece, Vol. 8
Facing 3282
. " 3484
Frontispiece, Vol. 9
John . Facing 3716
3788
3834
. " 3865
Frontispiece, Vol. 10
Facing 4168
4340
Frontispiece, Vol. ir
Facing 4636
Frontispiece, Vol. 12
Facing 5104
Frontispiece, Vol. 13
. Facing 5464
Facing 5614
Frontispiece, Vol. 14
. Facing 5874
Frontispiece, Vol. 15
Facing Index
LIST OF MAPS
APPEARING IN THE BOOK OF HISTORY
The World as Known to its First
Historian ..... 8
Shifting of the Centre of the World'.s
Commerce ..... 28
How the Mediterranean has Given
Place to the Atlantic ... 29
The First Maps ..... 51
Modern Representation of the World 52
The Europeanisation of the World . 55
The Shaping of the Face of the Earth 85
How Mountain Ranges were formed 87
Europe Before the British Isles were
Formed . . . . .118
The Submerged Lands of Europe . 119
Europe in the Ice Age . . . 155
Egypt in Three Periods . . . 243
Fiabylonia ...... 260
Sea Routes of Ancient Civilisation . 283
Land Routes of Ancient Civilisation 284
How Civilisation Spread through
Europe ..... 359
The Expansion of White Races . . 361
The Island that Rules the Sea . . 378
Oceans of the World . . . 383
Effect of Climate on the Course of
History ..... 391
Political Expansion .... 396
Relation of Rivers and Sea to the
Civilisation of Countries . . 397
South America
Africa .
Europe
The Far East, and Australia, Oceania
and Malaysia .... 406
The Island Empire of Japan . . 432
Japan in the Fifth Century . . 457
Siberia ...... 634
.Movement of the Peoples of Siberia . 656
Russia's Advance in Western Asia . 676
Growth of Russia in the Far East . 677
The Trans-Siberian Line . . . 692
The Chinese Empire . . . 708
Korea and its Surroundings . . 858
The Malay Archipelago . . 886
Islands of Oceania .... 947
New Zealand ..... 986
.•Kustralia and Tasmania . . loio
Britain Contrasted with Australia . 1012
South-east Australia, Indicating Prod-
ucts ...... 1013
Bed of the Pacific Ocean . . 1102
The Middle East .... 1120
Modern India . . . . .1161
India in 1801
Bed of the Indian Ocean and China
Sea ....
Suez Canal ...
Mountain Systems In and Around
Tibet ....
The Approach of Lhasa
Early Empires of the Ancient Near
East ......
Later Empires of the Ancient Near
East ......
Ancient Empires of Western Asia
Modern Africa ....
Races and Religions of Africa
Natural Products of Africa
Basin of the River Nile
Delta of the River Nile
Utica as it Was ....
The Remains of Utica
Ancient States of Mediterranean North
Africa ....
Niger River and Guinea Coast .
Great Britain in South Africa
Basin of the Zambesi
Basin of the Congo
General Map of Europe
Geographical Connection of the Medi
terranean Coasts .
Ancient Greece ....
World Empire of .Alexander the Great
Italy in the First Century B.C.
The Roman Empire
Origin of the Barbaric Nations .
Principal Countries of Eastern Europe
World's Great Empires Between T/J
and 814 A.D. . . . .
Turkey and Surrounding Countries in
the 14th and 17th Centuries .
Historical Maps of Poland and West-
ern Russia . . . . .
Western Europe in the Middle Ages
Europe During the Revolutionary Era
Modern Europe .
Britain's Maritime Enterprise
The British Empire in 1702
The British Empire in 1909
The Atlantic Ocean
South America in the Sixteenth Cen-
tury ....
South America as it is To-day
North Pole, with routes of Explorers
South Pole ...
North America .
PACE
1266
1419
1434
1457
1505
1562
1563
1582
2001
2005
2009
2022
2024
2188
2189
2191
2229
2322
2332
2347
2356
^m
2482
2561
2621
2738
2797
2894
2934
3082
3220
4138
4636
4788
5440
5462
5463
5656
5915
5983
6014
604s
6431
This is the story of the earth from the first thing we know of it to the
time in which wc live. It is the story of man from the first thing we know
of him to the last thought that the vision of modern science can suggest
HTHERE is no need here to discuss the
question how far it is possible to write a
universal histor}', or on what lines such a
history should proceed. These points may
well be left where Lord Bryce leaves them
in his introduction to this book. Nor need
we consider what history is ; the plain man
may be left to make up his own mind as to
that while the philosophers are making up
theirs. A word may be said, however, of
the plan and purpose of this work, especially
of that distinction of it which is at once the
ground of its appeal and its justification.
A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE
It is a commonplace to say of a great
work that it is unique, and there would at
first sight seem to be peculiar presumption
in making such a claim for a History of
the World. It may be claimed, however,
without any fear of contradiction, that this
work has no rival in the English language.
There have been histories of the world
before ; there are available in large numbers
histories of all countries well worthy of
attention ; but there is not, and it may be
doubted if there has ever been attempted
before, a scientific World-History. This
work is, as far as it can possibly be in
the present state of knowledge, a universal
history of the universe.
SCIENCE AND HISTORY
That is a far reaching claim to make, but
a mere glance through the names of those
whose services have been enlisted for the
work will make its basis clear. The con-
tributors include some of the foremost
students of science. Many men of eminence
whose names do not usually come into
historical works will be found here. Their
function may be described as holding the
Lamp of Science up to History. It is for
these authorities to read the story of the earth
and to tell the plain man what they read
there, as Turner read the sunset and painted
what he saw. The simile is not so unfortunate
as it may appear, because, although our can-
vas has not the same room for the artist's
imagination as Turner's had, it will probably
be admitted that the imagination of the
scientist is often nearer to the truth of things
than the conventional belief.
THE LIFE-STORY OF ALL NATIONS
And the scientist will come into our
History whenever and wherever science has
any light to throw upon its problems.
To the creators of this work the world is not
merely an aggregation of countries under
more or less settled governments, nor is
a country merely the seat of a political
system. They conceive the earth as a part
of the universe, as one world among many ;
and this is the story of a huge ball flying
in space, on which men and women live and
move, on which mighty nations rise and rule
and pass away, on which great empires
crumble into dust. It is the entrancing
book of man and the universe, the life-
story of all nations. It begins with the
beginning ; it regards the universe, as
modern science has taught us to regard
it, as a vast unit, in which the life of man
is the ultimate consummation.
THE BOOK OF HISTORY
A history of the world cannot be written
in a day. It is Uke an institution — it must
be allowed to grow. It would be a purposeless
sacrifice in an undertaking of such magni-
tude to reject any work of building-up that
is available, and this History has a rare
privilege in being able to utilise the result
of the matchless research, the tireless indus-
try, the unequalled knowledge of Dr. Hans
Helmolt and the distinguished staff of
scholars and investigators who have been
engaged with him for many years in prepar-
ing a history of the world on precisely the
lines laid down in this work.
THE MATERIAL FOR A WORLD HISTORY
It would be impossible to exaggerate the
value of the elaborate research made for
Dr. Helmolt by such of his eminent
collaborators as Professor Johannes Ranke,
Professor Ratzel, Professor Joseph Kohler,
and others whose names stand for foremost
authority wherever the value of learning
is understood, and it is one of the chief
claims of this work to recognition that it
has behind it all the material collected by
Dr. Helmolt's staff, with all the judgment
and skill of Dr. Helmolt himself in co-
ordinating the labour of his assistants.
A work so universal in time and place
must engage many minds. Behind it there
must be the labour and thought of many
lives. The materials for a world-history
cannot be amassed by one man, cannot be
gathered together in the time that it is
possible for one man to devote to them.
A moment's reflection reveals the vastness
and complexity of the arrangements for
such a work, the reaching-out into far
corners of the earth, the ransacking of his-
torical libraries and official archives ; the
placing of the result of all this research into
the hands of a hundred trained historians,
the analysing, sifting, and editing of each
part as if it were in itself a perfect whole.
A BOOK OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
All this labour can hardly be measured.
And if we add to our reckoning the work of
illustrating the world's history in pictures, the
task of finding illustrations where they are
rare as precious stones, or of choosing them
where their number is bewildering, the labour
that a world-history involves is, indeed,
incalculable. It can only be accomplished
by the co-operation of many minds, working
over a long period, drawing upon actual
experience in every part of the world.
Especially is this so in the present work.
There are histories that can be made up
from books, but this is not one of them.
The Book of History is not only a great
book of human experience, as every history
is ; it is the product of experience. It could
never have been written if the men who
write it had not helped to make the history
that they write.
THE MAKERS OF THE BOOK
It is a book of history by writers and makers
of history ; it is a book of action by men of
action ; it is a book, that is, by men who
know intimately the real life of the world.
When Professor Ratzel writes of the making
of nations, he writes with perhaps an
unequalled knowledge of the conditions that
have made for human progress ; when Dr.
Flinders Petrie writes of Egypt, when Dr.
Sayce writes of Assyria, they write with the
same authority that Sir Harry Johnston has
in writing of those parts of the British
Empire that he has helped to govern.
The real rulers of the world are not the
princes, and among the makers of this book
are men who, though the fierce light that
beats upon a throne has not beat upon them,
have borne the burden of empire and of ruling
men. It is the ideal collaboration, that of
the brilliant investigator, the scientific inter-
preter, and the man of affairs, and it makes
possible the achievement of a History
which we have claimed to be unique.
THE WORLD YESTERDAY, TO-DAY & TO-MORROW
We have the facts from the pens of the
men who have dug them up fresh from the
earth itself or who know them from experi-
ence ; we have them treated by the men
who can turn upon them the full light of
modern science ; we have the world as it
moves in our own time described by the men
who know it from the centre, and know it
therefore best.
This is the story of the world, then,
yesterday and to-ds,y. And, as history goes
on, as to-day becomes yesterday and to-
morrow becomes to-day, we shall find in
this book a vision of the things that lie
before. Out of the deeps of Time came man.
Through the mists of Time he grew. Down
the ages of Time he goes. Whence he came
we guess ; how he lives we know ; where
he goes the wisdom of History does not
tell. But the historj' of the world is young,
and young men shall see visions.
The Editors
THE BOOK OF HISTORY
The Life-Story of the Earth and of All Nations
TOLD IN SEVEN GRAND DIVISIONS
This plan provides a general scheme for the Histokv, but is not intended for
reference. It does not follow that the exact order of countries here given is
maintained throughout the volumes. A full index appears at the end of the work
I— MAN AND THE UNIVERSE
fllE WORM) AND ITS STORY
A View Across the Ages : Introduction
Summary of the History of the World
Chronology of 10,000 Years and Chart of Nations
MAKING OF THE EARTH AND THE COMING OF MAN
The Beginning of the Earth
How Life is Possible on the Earth
The Beginning of Life on the Earth
How Man Obtained the Mastery of the Earth
THE RISE OF MAN AND THE EVE OF HISTORY
T^e World Before History
The Great Steps In Man's Development
BIRTH OF CIVILISATION & THE GROWTH OF RACES
The Beginnings of Civilisation
Hour Civilisation Came to Europe
The Triumph of Race
An Alphabet of the World's Races
MAKING OF NATIONS & THE INFLUENCE OF NATURE
The Birth and Growth of Nations
Influence of Land and Water on National History
How Nations are Affected by Their Environment
The Size and Powrer of Nations
The Future History of Han
II— THE FAR EAST
The Interest and Importance of the Far East
Japan. Siberia. China. Korea
Malaysia
Philippines. Malay States. Straits Settlements. Borneo. Sarawak.
Sumatra. Java. New Guinea, and other Islands of Malay Archipelago
Australia
New South Wales. Victoria. Queensland. South Australia. West
Australia. Tasmania
NewZe.iland. Fiji. Pitcairn. Hawaii. Samoa. Tonya and other Islands
The Influence of the Paciflc Ocean In History
III— THE MIDDLE EAST
The Importance of the Middle East
India. Including Ceylon and the Native States
Further India
Slam. Aiinam. Burma. Tonking. Cochin China. Cambodi,a. Champa
The Influence of the Indian Ocean in History
Central Asia. Afghanistan. Baluchistan. Turkestan. Thibet
IV— THE NEAR EAST
The Ancient Empires of Western Asia
Bjljylonia. Assyria, hiam
Early Nations of Western Asia
Scythia. Sarmatia. Armenia. Syria. Phoenicia. Israel
IWestern Asia from the Rise of Persia to Mohammed
Persia. Asia Minor. Syria. Pakstiiie. Arabia. Muditerrane.in Islands
Western Asia from the Time of Mohammed
The Saracen Dominion. The Turkish limpire in Asia. Persia. Arabia
V— AFRICA
Legacy of Ancient Empires to the Modern World
Egypt and the Egyptian Sudan
North Africa
Triijoli. Tunis. Morocco. Algeria and the French Territories.
Sierra l.eone. Liberia. Gold Coast. Nigeria. German West Africa.
Abyssinia. Somaliland. Erythrea. British East Africa. Zanzibar
South Africa
Native Races. The Portuguese and Dutch in South Africa. British
South Africa : Cape Colony. Natal. Transvaal, Orange KWer Colony,
Rhodesia. Congo Free State. Portuguese East Africa. Angola.
German East Africa. German South-West Africa. Madagascar
VI— EUROPE
1. EUROPE TO THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Mediterranean Influence in the Malting of Europe
The Ancient Spirit of Greece and Rome
Early Peoplas of Europe. Ascendancy of the Greeks
The Rise of Rome and the World Empire
Social Fabric of the Ancient World: Slave States
2. EASTERN EUROPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION
The Byzantine Empire and the Turic in Europe
The Middle Peoples
Russia, Poland, and the Baltic Provinces
The Social Fabric of the Hedisevai World:
The Twilight of Nations
S. WESTERN EUROPE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
A Survey of Western Mediaeval Europe
The Peoples of Western Europe
The Importance of the Baltic Sea
The Emerging of the Nations
Fr.iiikish Dominion ami the Empire of Charlemagrne. England.
Spanish Peiiinsul.i. Italy. The I'apacy, Scandinavia
The Development of the Nations
The (ierman or Holy Roman Empire. Fr.ance. England. Spain
and Portugal. Italy. The Pap.icy. Scandinavia
The Crusades. Industry and Commerce
4. WESTERN EUROPE FROM THE REFORMATION
TO THE REVOLUTION
A Survey of Western Europe
The Reformation and Wars of Religion
The Age of Louis XIY.
From the Peace of Westphalia to the Treaty of Utrecht
The Ending of the Old Order
From the Treaty of Utrecht to the Revolution
The Importance of the Atlantic to the DSTorld Powers
Religion After the Reformation. Industry and
Commerce
5. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era
The Revolution. The Republic at War and the Rise of Napoleon.
Tlie Zeiiiili of .N,i],oleoii and his Fall
Great Britain in the Napoleonic Era
6. THE RE-MAKING OF EUROPE
Revolt Against Despotism
Europe After Waterloo
The Iriuiupli of Despotism.
Europe in Revolution
The Second French Republic and the Coup d'Etat. The Up-
rising of tne Little .Nations. National Movements in Gennany
The Consolidation of the Po'wers
Europe and the Second Empire. 1 he Unification of Italy. The
Unification of Germany. The l*ranco-Gernian War
Great Britain to 1871. Russia and Turkey to 1871.
Europe since 1871
Gre.it Britain. Germany. France. Austria-Hungary. Spain and
Portugal. Italy. Russia. Turkey. Switzerland. Greece.
Belgium. Holland. Denmark. Norway. Sweden. Bulgaria. Servia.
Rouniania. Montenegro. Luxemburg. Monaco. San Marino
7. THE EUROPEAN POWERS TO-DAY
Europe in Our 0«rn Time
Great Britain. Germany. Austria-Hungary. France.
Italy. Russia. Turkey. Spain and Portugal
Minor States of Europe:
Switzt-rland. Cireece. Belgium. Holland. Denmark. Norway.
Sweden. Bulgaria. Servia. Kouinania. Montenegro. Luxemburg.
Monaco. San Marino
VII— AMERICA
America Before Columbus
The Primitive Races of America.
Central .\merica. The Ancient Ci
The Ancient Civilisation of
ilisation of South America
The European Colonisation
The Discovery. The Spanish Conquest. The Spanish and
Portuguese Flmpire in America. The Independence of South and
Centr.al America. The Pilgrim Fathers and the Enghsh Settle-
ment. The Development and Expansion of the British Colonies
The American Nation
The Revolt of the Thirteen Colonies. The Struggle for Indepen-
dence and the War. The Creation of the United States. The
D.-vclopment of the American Nation. The United States in
Our Own Time
British America
Canada. Newfoundland. British Westlndies. British Honduras.
Bermudas.
Central America In the 10th and 30th Centuries
Culii. Haiti. Dominica. Porto Rico. Mexico. Guatemala.
Honduras. San Salvador. Nicaragu.i. Cost.i Rica. I'anama
South America in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Colombia, \eiieiuel.i. I rilish. 1- rem li .iiid Dutch Guiana. Bra/il.
Ei.li idor. Peru. Chili, liulnia. P.ir.igii.iy. Argentina. Uruguay
The World Around the Poles
Greenland. Iceland. Arctic and Antarctic Oceans
X-
^
THE BOOK OF HISTORY
FIRST GRAND DIVISION
MAN AND THE UNIVERSE
FIRST GRAND DIVISION
AAN AND THE UNIVERSE
There can, of course, be neither absolute finality nor entire unanimity
in the subjects of these chapters, which are designed to enable the
reader to follow the course of history with greater interest and under-
standing than would be possible without some scientific knowledge of
life. They are presented as a symposium of modern thought on the
problems concerning the origin and development of the earth and mankind
PLAN
THE WORLD AND ITS STORY
A VIEW ACROSS THE AGES
Rt. Hon. James Bryce
A SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Arthur D. Innes, M.A.
CHRONOLOGY OF 10,000 YEARS AND CHART OF NATIONS
MAKING OF THE EARTH & THE COMING OF MAN
THE BEGINNING OF THE EARTH
Dr. Wm. Johnson Sollas, F.R.S.
HOW LIFE BECAME POSSIBLE ON THE EARTH
Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, F.R.S.
HOW MAN OBTAINED THE MASTERY OF THE EARTH
Dr. Archdall Reid, F.R.S.E.
THE RISE OF MAN AND THE EVE OF HISTORY
THE WORLD BEFORE HISTORY
Professor Johannes Ranke
THE GREAT STEPS IN MAN'S DEVELOPMENT
Professor Joseph Kohler
BIRTH OF CIVILISATION & THE GROWTH OF RACES
THE BIRTH OF CIVILISATION
Dr. Flinders Petrie, F.R.S.
HOW CIVILISATION CAME TO EUROPE
David George Hogarth, M.A.
THE TRIUMPH OF RACE
Dr. Archdall Reid, F.R.S.E.
ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
VV. E. Garrett Fisher, Al.A.
MAKING OF NATIONS & THE INFLUENCE OF NATURE
Professor Friedrich Rat/el
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF NATIONS
INFLUENCE OF LAND & WATER ON NATIONAL HISTORY
EFFECT OF ENVIRONMENT ON NATIONS
THE SIZE AND POWER OF NATIONS
THE FUTURE HISTORY OF MAN
For full contents and page numbers see Index
Mr. Kiplin^j's " Roccssioii.-il " is quoted in a Frontispiece from " The Five Nations,"
by permission of the Author and the Publishers. Messrs. Mi'thut-n
TH
P^/N&^m(^^^^^ G R ^
A VIEW ACROSS THE AGES
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF HISTORY
BY THE RIGHT HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
"\Y7HEN History, properly so called, has
^ emerged from those tales of the feats
of kings and heroes and those brief entries
in the roll of a temple or a monastery m
which we find the earliest records of the
past, the idea of composing a narrative
which shall not be confined to the for-
tunes of one nation soon presents itself.
Herodotus — the first true historian, and
a historian in his own line never yet sur-
passed— took for his subject the strife be-
tween Greeks and Barbarians
_ ^ "^ which culminated in the Great
„. . Persian War of B.C. 480, and
worked into his book all he
could ascertain regarding most of the great
peoples of the world — Babylonians and
Egyptians, Persians and Scythians, as well
as Greeks. Since his time many have
essayed to write a Universal History ; and
as knowledge grew, so the compass of these
treatises increased, till the outlying nations
of the East were added to those of the
Mediterranean and West European world
which had formerly filled the whole canvas.
None of these books, however, covered
the field or presented an adequate view
of the annals of mankind as a whole. It
was indeed impossible to do this, because
the data were insufficient. Till some time
way down in the nineteenth century that
part of ancient history which was pre-
served in written documents could be
based upon the literature of Israel, ujwn
such notices regarding Egypt, Assyria,
Babylon, and Iran as had been preserved
by Greek or Roman writers, and upon
those writers themselves. It was only
for some of the Greek cities, for the
kingdoms of Alexander and his successors,
and for the city and Emjnre of Rome
that fairly abundant materials were then
available. Of the world outside Europe
and Western Asia, whether ancient or
modern, scarcely anything was known,
scarcely anything even of the earlier annals
of comparatively civilised peoples, such as
those of India, China, and Japan, and still
less of the rudimentary civilisations of
Mexico and Peru. Nor, indeed, had most
of the students who occupied themselves
with the subject perceived how important
a part in the general j^rogress of mankind
the more backward races have played,
or how essential to a true History of the
World is an account of the semi-civilised
and even of the barbarous peoples. Thus it
was not possible, until quite recent times,
that the great enterprise of preparing such
c . ^.,. a history should be attempted
Scientific •{ • ., . * . ,
„. on a plan or with materials
IS oryon y ^^jjj^^|-,jg ^^ j^^ magnitude.
now Possible i-i 1 , r 1 ■
1 he last seventy or eighty
years have seen a vast increase in our
materials, with a corresponding widening
of the conception of what a History of the
World should be. Accordingly, the time
for trying to produce one upon a new plan
and enlarged scale seems to have arrived ;
not, indeed, that the years to come will
not continue to add to the historian's
resources, but that those resources have
recently become so much amj:)ler than
they have ever been before that the
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
New Material
and
New Methods
moment may be deemed auspicious for
a new departure.
The nineteenth century was marked by
three changes of the utmost consequence
for the writing of history.
That century, in the first place, has
enormously widened our knowledge of
the times hitherto called prehistoric.
The discovery of methods for deciphering
the inscriptions found in Egypt and
Western Asia, the excavations m Assyria
and Egypt, in Continental
Greece and in Crete, and
to a lesser extent in North
Africa also, in the course
of which many inscriptions have been
collected and fragments of ancient art
examined, have given us a mass of
knowledge regarding the nations who
dwelt in these countries larger and
more exact than was possessed by the
writers of classical antiquity who lived
comparatively near to those remote times.
We possess materials for the study not
only of the political history but of the
ethnology, the languages, and the culture
of the nations which were first civilised
incomparably better than were those at
the disposal of the contemporaries of Vico
or Gibbon or Herder. Similar results
have followed as regards the Far East,
from the opening up of Sanskrit literature
and of the records of China and Japan. To
a lesser degree,
the same thing
another. As history proper has been
carried back many centuries beyond its
former limit, so has our knowledge of
prehistoric times been extended centuries
above the furthest point to which history
can now reach back. And this applies
not only to the countries previously
little explored, but to such well-known
districts as Western Europe and the
Atlantic coast of America.
Secondly, there has been during the
nineteenth century a notable improvement
in the critical method of handling historical
materials. Much more pains have been
taken to examine all available documents
and records, to obtain a perfect text of
each by a comparison of manuscripts or
of early printed copies, and to study each
by the aid of other contemporary matter.
It is true that, with the exception of
Egyptian papyri and some manuscripts
unearthed in Oriental monasteries (besides
those Indian, Chinese, and other
early Eastern sacred books to which
I have already referred), not very much
that is absolutely new has been brought to
light. It is also true that a few of the
most capable students in earlier days, in
the ancient world as well as since the
Renaissance, have fully seen the value of
original authorities and have applied to
them thoroughly critical methods. This
is not a discovery of our own times. . Still,
it may be
claimed that
there was never
before so great a
zeal for collecting
and investigating
all possible kinds
of original texts,
nor so widely
diffused a know-
ledge of the
methods to be
applied in turn-
has happened as
regards the semi-
civilised peoples
of tropical
America both
north and south
of the Isthmus
of Panama. And
while long periods
of time have
thus been brought
within the range the world as known to its first historian ing them to ac
r\( Viicf/->rir \trn The world as known to Herodotus is shown by the white part of this rniint for +Vif»
Ol History, WL map. indicating the limited range of ancient geographical knowledge. '-^""'- i'-'i ^ ^"-UC
have also learnt
much more about the times that
may still be called prehistoric. The
investigations carried on in mounds and
caves and tombs and lake-dwellings,
the collection of early stone and bronze
implements, and of human skulls and
bones found along with those of other
animals, have thrown a great deal of new
light upon primitive man, his way of
hfe, and his migrations from one region to
8
purposes of his-
tory. Both in Europe and in America
an unprecedentedly large number of
competent men have been employed
upon researches of this kind, and the
result of their labours on special topics
has been to provide the writer who seeks
to present a general view of history with
materials not only larger but far fitter
for his use than his predecessors ever
enjoyed. Then with the improvement
INTRODUCTION BY RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
in critical apparatus, there has come a
more cautious and exact habit of mind
m the interpretation of facts.
Thirdly, the progress of the sciences
of Nature has powerfully influenced his-
tory, both by providing new da<a and
by affecting the mental attitude of all
reflective men. This has happened in
several ways. Geographical exploration
has made known
nearly every part
of the surface
of the habitable
globe. The great
natural features of
every country, its
mountain ranges and
rivers, its forest or
deserts, have been
ascertained. Its
flora and fauna have
been described, and
thereby its capacity
lor supporting
human life approxi-
mately calculated.
The other physical
conditions which
govern the develop-
ment of man, such
as temperature, rain-
fall, and the direc-
tion of prevalent
winds have been
examined. Thus we
have acquired a
treasury of facts re-
'THE FATHER OF HISTORY'
latins to the causes Herodotus, the first historian, was born between B.
, ^ 1 • , • 470-480 at Halicarnassus, a Greek colony in Asia Min
«,nd conditions
■ which help the growth of civilisation and
mould it into diverse forms, conditions
whose importance I shall presently discuss
in considering the relation of man to his
natural environment. Although a few
penetrating minds had long ago seen how
much the career of each nation must
have been affected by physical pheno-
mena, it is only in the last two genera-
tions that men have begun to study these
phenomena in their relation to history,
and to appreciate their influence in the
formation of national types and in deter-
mining the movement of races over the
earth's surface.
Not less remarkable has been the in-
crease in our knowledge of the more
remote and backward peoples. Nearly
every one of these has now been visited
by scientific travellers or missionaries, its
language written down, its customs and
religious rites, sometimes its folk lore also,
recorded. Thus materials of the highest
value have been secured, not only for
completing our knowledge of mankind as
a whole, but for comprehending in the
early history of the now highly civilised
peoples various facts which had previously
remained obscure, but which became
intelligible when
compared with simi-
lar facts that can
be studied in their
actuality among
tribes whom we find
in the same stage
to-day as were the
ancestors of the
civilised nations
many centuries ago.
The progress thus
achieved in the
science of man re-
garded as a part of
Nature has power-
fully contributed to
influence the study
of human com-
munities as they
appear in history.
The comparative
method has become
the basis for a truly
scientific inquiry
into the develop-
ment of institutions,
and the connection
of religious beliefs
and ceremonies with
the first beginnings of institutions both
social and political has been made clear
by an accumulation of instances. Whether
or no there be such a thing as a Science
of History — a question which, since it is
mainly verbal, one need not stop to discuss
— there is such a thing as a scientific
method applied to history ; and the more
familiar men have become
with the methods of inquiry
and canons of evidence used
in physical investigations,
so much the more have they tended to
become exact and critical in historical
investigations, and to examine the causes
and the stages by and through which
historical development is effected.
In noting this I do not suggest that
what is popularly called the " Doctrine
of Evolution " should be deemed a thing
c.
inor
Progress
of the
Sciences
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
borrowed by history from the sciences of
nature. Most of what is true or helpful
in that doctrine was known long ago, and
applied long ago by historical and political
. thinkers. You can find it in
Historical ^ristotle, perhaps before Aris-
Knowledge ^^^^^ Even as regards the bio-
in Uur lime , • » ■ ,i i- x
logical sciences, the notion oi
what we call evolution is ancient ; and the
merit of Darwin and other great modern
naturalists has lain, not in enouncing
the idea as a general theory, but in
elucidating, illustrating, and demonstrat-
ing the processes by which evolution takes
place. The influence of the natural sciences
on history is rather to be traced in the
efforts we now see to accumulate a vast
mass of facts relating to the social, eco-
nomic, and pohtical hfe of man, for the
sake of discovering general laws run-
ning through them, and imparting to them
order and unity.
Although the most philosophic and
diligent historians have always aimed
at and striven for this, still the general
diffusion of the method in our own
time, and the greatly increased scale
on which it is applied, together with the
higher standard of accuracy which is
exacted by the opinion of competent
judges, may be, in some measure,
ascribed to the examples which those
who work in the spheres of physics and
biology and natural history have so
effectively set.
Finally, the progress of natural science
has in our time, by stimulating the
production and exchange of commodities,
drawn the different parts of the earth
much nearer to one another, and
thus brought nearly all its tribes and
nations into relations with one another
far closer and far more frequent than
existed before.
This has been done by the inventions
that have given us steam and electricity
as motive forces, making transport quicker
and cheaper, and by the ajiplication of elec-
tricity to the transmission of words. No
changes that have occurred in the past
(except perhaps changes in the s])here of
religion) are comjiarable in
"*"*'*' their importance as factors in
?. ^ „ history to those which have
Human Race 1^1,1 /
shortened the voyage from
Western ICurope to America to five and a
half days, and made communication with
Australia instantaneous. For the first
time the human race, always essentially
10
one, has begun to feel itself one, and
civilised man has in every part of it
become a contemporaneous observer of
what passes in every other part.
The general result of these various
changes has been that while the materials
for writing a history of the world have
been increased, the conception of what such
a history should be has been at the same
time both enlarged and defined. Its
scope is wider ; its lines are more clearly
drawn. But what do we mean by a
Universal History ? Briefly, a History
which shall, first, include all the races
and tribes of man within its scope ; and,
secondly, shall bring all these races and
tribes into a connection with one another
such as to display their annals as an
organic whole.
Universal history has to deal not only
with the great nations, but also with the
small nations ; not only with the civilised,
but also with the barbarous or savage
peoples ; not only with the times of move-
ment and progress, but also with the times
of silence and apparent stagnation.
Every fraction of humanity has contributed
something to the common
Importance ^^^^j^^ ^^^ ^^^ y^^,^^ ^^^
° * ^. _ laboured not for itself only,
ma aces ^^^ ^^^ others also, through the
influence which it has perforce exercised
on its neighbours. The only exceptions
we can imagine are the inhabitants of some
remote isle, " far placed amid the melan-
choly main." Yet they, too, must hav^e
once formed part of a race dwelling in the
region whence they came, even if that race
had died out in its old home before
civilised man set foot on such an oceanic
isle in a later age. The world would have
been different, in however small a measure,
had they never existed. As in the realm
of physical science, so in that of history
no fact is devoid of significance, though
the true significance may remain long
unnoticed. The history of the backward
races presents exceptional difficulties,
because they have no written records, and
often scarcely any oral traditions. Some-
times it reduces itself to a description of
their usages and state of life, their arts and
their superstitions, at the time when civil-
ised observers first visited them. Yet that
history is instructive, not only because
the phenomena observable among such
races enlarge our knowledge, but also
because through the study of those which
survive we are able to interpret the scanty
T "r:yi:o l-^W
^te^
ANCIENT EGYPT'S STRANGE BOOKS AND PICTORIAL RECORDS, MADE OF PAPYRUS
Papyrus, a tall, graceful, sedgy plant, supplied the favourite writing material of the ancient world, and many price-
less records of antiquity are preserved to us in papyri. The pith of the plant was pressed flat and thin and joined
with others to form strips, on which records were written or painted The above is a photograph of a piece of Egyptian
papyrus, showing both hieroglyphics and picture-writing. Th,- oldest piece of papyrus dates back to B.C. 3500.
records we possess of the early condition
of peoples now civilised, and to go some
way towards writing the history of
what we have hitherto called pre-
historic man.
Thus such tribes as the aborigines of
Australia, the Fuegians of jVIagellan's
Straits, the Bushmen of South Africa, the
Sakalavas of Madagascar, the Lapps of
Northern Europe, the Ainos of Japan, the
numerous " hill-tribes " of India, will all
come within the historian's ken. From
each of them something may be learnt ;
and each of them has through contact
with its more advanced neighbours affected
those neighbours themselves, sometimes
in blood, sometimes through superstitious
beliefs or rites, frequently borrowed by the
higher races from the lower (as the
Norsemen learnt magic from the Lapps,
and the Semites of Assyria from the
Accadians), sometimes through the strife
which has arisen between the savage
and the more civilised man, whereby
the institutions of the latter have been
modified.
Obviously the historian cannot record
everything. These lower races are com-
paratively unimportant. Their contribu-
tions to progress, their effect on the
general march of events, have been but
small. But they must not be wholly
omitted from the picture, for without them
it would have been different. One must
never forget, in following the history of
the great nations of antiquity, that they
fought and thought and built up the fabric
of their industry and art in the midst
of a barbarous or savage population
surrounding them on all sides, whence
they drew the bulk of their slaves
and some of their mercenary soldiers,
and which .sometimes avenged itself by
sudden inroads, the fear of which kept
the Greek cities, and at certain epochs
even the power of Rome, watchful
and anxious. So in modern times
the savages among whom European
colonies have been planted, or who
have been transported as slaves to other
colonies — sometimes, as in the case of
Portugal in the fifteenth century, to
II
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Europe itself — or those with whom Euro-
peans have carried on trade, must not be
omitted from a view of the causes which
have determined the course of events in
the civihsed peoples.
To dwell on the part played by the small
nations is less necessary here, for even a
superficial student must be
p ! * of them have counted for more
eop es \^\^^ii the larger nations to
whose annals a larger space is commonly
allotted. The instance of Israel is enough,
so far as the ancient world is concerned,
to show how little the numbers of a people
have to do with the influence it may
exert. For the modern world, I will take
the case of Iceland.
The Icelanders are a people much smaller
than even was Israel. They have never
numbered more than about sev^enty
thousand. They live in an isle so far remote,
and so sundered from the rest of the world
by an inhospitable ocean, that their re-
lations both with Europe, to which ethnolo-
gically they belong, and with America, to
which geographically they belong, have
been comparatively scanty. But their his-
tory, from the first settlement of the island
by Norwegian exiles in a.d. 874 to the
extinction of the National Republic in
A.D. 1264, is full of interest and instruc-
tion, in some respects a perfectly unique
history. And the literature which this
Iiandful of people produced is certainly
the most striking primitive literature
which any modern people has produced,
superior in literary quality to that of the
Continental Teutons, or to that of the
Romance nations, or to that of the Finns
or Slavs, or even to that of the Celts. Yet
most histories of Europe pass by Iceland
altogether, and few persons in Continental
Europe (outside Scandinavia) know any-
thing about the inhabitants of this isle,
who, amid glaciers and volcanoes, have
maintained themselves at a
high level of intelligence and
culture for more than a
tliousand years.
The small peoples have no doubt been
more potent in the spheres of intellect
and emotion than in those of war, politics,
or commerce. But the influences which
belong to the sphere of creative in-
telligence— that is to say, of literature,
philosophy, religion and art — are just those
which it is peculiarly the function of a
History of the World to disengage and
12
The Culture
of the
Icelanders
follow out in their far-reaching con-
sequence. They pass beyond the limits of
the country where they arose. They sur-
vive, it may be, the race that gave birth
to them. They pass into new forms, and
through these they work in new ways
upon subsequent ages.
It is also the task of universal history
so to trace the march of humanity as
to display the relation which each part
of it bears to the others ; to fit each
race and tribe and nation into the main
narrative. To do this, three things are
needed — a comprehensive knowledge, a
power of selecting the salient and signifi-
cant points, and a talent for arrangement.
Of these three qualifications, the first is
the least rare. Ours is an age of
specialists ; but the more a man buries
himself in special studies, the more risk
does he incur of losing his sense of the
place which the object of his own study
fills in the general scheme of things.
The highly trained historian is generally
able to draw from those who have
worked in particular depart-
_ ^ * ^ ments the data he needs ;
cope o ^]-,iig the master of one single
department may be unable to
carry his vision over the whole horizon,
and see each part of the landscape in its
relations to the rest.
In other words, a History of the World
ought to be an account of the human
family as an organic whole, showing how
each race and state has affected other
races or states, what each has brought
into the common stock, and how the
interaction among them has stimulated
some, depressed or extinguished others,
turned the main current this way or that.
Even when the annals of one particular
country are concerned, it needs no small
measure of skill in expression as well as
of constructive art to trace their connec-
tion with those of other countries. To
take a familiar example, he who writes
the history of England must have his
eye always alive to what is passing in
France on one side, and in Scotland on
the other, not to speak of countries less
closely connected with England, such as
Germany and Spain. He must let the
reader feel in what way the events that
were happening in France and Scotland
affected men's minds, and through men's
minds affected the progress of events in
England. Yet he cannot allow himself
constantly to interrupt his Enghsh narra-
VIVID SCENiI. Jl ANCIENT LIFE DEPICTED BY CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS
The walls of the tombs in Egypt form a great picture gallery of the vanished life of that country and are invaluable
to the historian. This fragment from the British Museum shows how vividly the domestic figures were realised.
tive in order to tell what was passing
beyond the Channel or across the Tweed.
Obviously, this difficulty is much in-
creased when the canvas is widened to
include all Europe, and when the aim
is to give the reader a just impression of
the general tendencies of a whole age,
such an age as, for instance, the six-
teenth century, over that vast area. If
for a History of the World the old plan
be adopted — that of telhng the story of
each nation separately, yet on lines
generally similar, cross references and a
copious use of chronological tables be-
come helpful, for they enable the
contemporaneity of events to be seen
at a glance, and as the history of
each nation is being written with a
view to that of other nations, the
tendencies at work in each can be ex-
plained and illustrated in a way which
shows their parallelism, and gives
to the whole that unity of meaning
and tendency which a universal history
must constantly endeavour to display.
The connection between the progress or
. . decline of different peoj^les is
,.'*! ^ ° , best understood by setting
„. forth the various forms which
'^^ similar tendencies take in each.
To do this is a hard task when the his-
torian is dealing with the ancient world,
or with the world outside Europe even in
mediaeval and post-mediaeval times. For
the modern European nations it is easier,
because, ever since the spread of Christi-
anity made these nations parts of one great
ecclesiastical community, similar forces
have been at work upon each of them,
and every intellectual movement which
has told upon one has more or less told
upon the others also.
Such a History of the World may be
written on more than one plan, and in the
light of more than one general theory of
human progress. It might find the central
line of human development in the increase
of man's knowledge, and in particular of
his knowledge of Nature and his power
of dealing with her. Or that which we
call culture, the comprehensive unfolding
and polishing of human faculty and of the
power of intellectual creation and appreci-
_ , , , . ation, might be taken as mark-
Central Line - ^-u J. 1 J ij
, „ mg the most real and solid
of Human i • j j ^i, j. m
_ , . kind of progress, so that its
Development xl i j i_ \l
growth would best represent
the advance of man from a savage to a
highly civilised condition. Or if the moral
and political sphere were selected as that in
which the onward march of man as a social
being, made to live in a community,
could best be studied, the idea of liberty
might be made a pivot of the scheme ;
for in showing how the individual emerges
from the family or the tribe, how first
domestic and then also praedial slavery
slowly disappears, how institutions are
framed under which the will of one ruler
or of a small group begins to be controlled,
or replaced as a governing force, by the
collective will of the members of the
13
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
of Human
Society
community, how the primordial rights of
each human creature win their way to
recognition — in tracing out all these things
the history of human society
If H. i.7 is practically written, and the
significance of all political
changes is made clear. Another
way, again, would be to take some
concrete department of human activity,
follow it down from its earliest to its
latest stages, and group other depart-
ments round it. Thus one author might
take religion, and in making the his-
tory of religion the main thread of his
narrative might deal incidentally with
the other phenomena which have in-
fluenced it or which it has influenced.
Or, similarly, another author might take
political institutions, or perhaps economic
conditions — i.e., wealth, labour, capital,
Each Race
a Distinct
Entity
THE MASTER-KEY TO THE HIEROGLYPHICS
The i.iscribed stone found at Rosetta, in the Nile delta, in 1799, now preserved
in the British Museum. It gave the key to the hieroglyphic writings of Egypt.
It is a decree of Ptolemy Epiphanes, promulgated at Memphis in B.C. 196, and
as it is inscribed in hieroglyphic ancf in the script of the country as well as
in Greek, it thus solved the long standing mystery of the hieroglyphics
of the monuments, which before its discovery had been quite unintelligible.
14
commerce, or, again, the fundamental
social institutions, such as the family,
and the relations of the ranks and classes
in a community, and build up round one
or other of these manifestations and
embodiments of the creative energy of
mankind the general story of man's move-
ment from barbarism to civilisation. Even
art, even mechanical inventions, might be
similarly handled, for both of these stand
in a significant relation to all the rest of the
life of each nation and of the world at large.
Nevertheless, no one of these
suggested lines on which a
universal history might be con-
structed would quite meet the
expectations which the name Universal
History raises, because we have become
accustomed to think of history as being
primarily and pre-eminently a narrative of
the growth and develop-
ment of communities,
nations, and states as or-
ganised political bodies,
seeing that it is in their
character as bodies so
organised that they come
into relation with other
nations and states. It is
therefore better to follow
tlie familiar plan of deal-
ing with the annals of
each race and nation as
a distinct entity, while
endeavouring to show
throughout the whole
narrative the part which
each fills in the general
drama of human effort,
conflict, and progress.
A universal history
may, however, while
conforming to this estab-
lished method, follow it
out along a special line,
which shall give promi-
nence to some one lead-
ing idea or principle.
Such a line or point of
view has been found
for the present work
in the relation of man
to his physical environ-
ment— that is to say,
to the geographical con-
ditions which have
always surrounded him,
and always must sur-
round him, conditions
UNEARTHING THE RUINS OF ANCIENT BABYLON IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
This photograph illustrates how present-day exploration brings the remains of the ancient wonder cities of Babylonia
to light after the sleep of ages. Much valuable knowledge of Babylon has been acquired quite recently as a result
of excavations now being carried on under the supervision of English, American, French, and German explorers.
whose power and influence he has felt
ever since he appeared upon the globe.
This point of view is more comprehen-
sive than any one of those above enu-
merated. Physical environment has told
upon each and every one of the lines
of human activity already enumerated
that could be taken to form a central
line for the writing of a history of man-
kind. It has influenced not only political
institutions and economic phenomena, but
also religion, and social institutions, and
art, and inventions. No department of
man's life has been independent of it, for
it works upon man not only materially
but also intellectually and morally.
As this is the idea which has governed
the preparation of the present book, as it
is constructed upon a geographical rather
than a purely chronological plan (though,
of course, each particular country and
nation needs to be treated chronologi-
cally), some few pages may properly
be devoted here to a consideration of the
way in which geography determines
history, or, in other words, to an
examination of the relations of Nature,
inorganic and organic, to the life of man.
MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE'S KINGDOM
TTHOUGH we are accustomed to contrast
^ man with Nature, and to look upon the
world outside ourselves as an object to
be studied by man, the conscious and
intelligent subject, it is evident, and has
been always recognised even by those
thinkers who have most exalted the place
man holds in the Cosmos, that man is also
to be studied as a part of the physical uni-
verse. He belongs to the realm of Nature
in respect of his bodily constitution, which
links him with other animals, and in certain
respects with all the phenomena that lie
within the sphere of biology.
All creatures on our earth, since they
have bodies formed from material con-
stituents, are subject to the physical laws
which govern matter ; and the life of all
is determined, so far as their bodies are
concerned, by the physical conditions
which foster, or depress, or destroy life.
Plants need soil, moisture, sunshine, and
certain constituents of the atmosphere.
Their distribution over the earth's surface
15
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
depends not only upon the greater or less
extent to which these things, essential to
their existence, are present, but also upon
the configuration of the earth's surface
(continents and oceans), upon the greater
or less elevation above sea level of parts of
it, upon such forces as winds and ocean
currents (occasionally also upon volcanoes),
upon the interposition of arid deserts be-
tween moister regions, or upon the flow of
great rivers. The flora of each country
is the resultant (until man appears upon
the scene) of these na-tural conditions.
We know that some plants are
also affected by the presence of certain
animals, particularly insects and birds.
Similarly, animals depend upon these
same conditions which regulate their
distribution, partly directly, partly in-
directly, or mediately through the depend-
ence of the animal for food upon the
plants whose presence or absence these
conditions have determined. It would
seem that animals, being capable of
moving from place to place, and thus of
finding conditions suitable for their life,
and to some extent of modifying their life
to suit the nature around them, are some-
what more independent than plants are,
though plants, too, possess powers of adapt-
-, , . ing themselves to climatic sur-
„ .... roundmgs ; and there are some
Conditions i ? ■
, w ., — such, lor mstance, as our com-
mon brake-fern and the grass of
Parnassus — which seem able to thrive un-
modified in very different parts of the globe.
The primary needs of man which he
shares with the other animals are an
atmosphere which he can breathe, a tem-
perature which he can support, water
which he can drink, and food. In respect
of these he is as much the product of geo-
graphical conditions as are the other
living creatures. Presently he superadds
another need, that of clothing. It is a
sign that he is becoming less dependent
on external conditions, for by means of
clothing he can make his own temperature
and suocccd in enduring a degree of cold,
or changes from heat to cold, which might
otherwise shorten his life. The discovery
of fire carries him a long step further, for
it not only puts him less at the mercy of
low temperatures, but extends the range
of his food supplies, and enables him, by
procuring better tools and weapons, to
obtain his food more easily. We need not
pursue his upward course, at every stage
of which he finds himself better and still
i6
better able to escape from the thraldom
of Nature, and to turn to account the
forces which she puts at his disposal. But
although he becomes more and more inde-
pendent, more and more master not only
of himself, but of her, he is none the less
always for many purposes the creature of
the conditions with which she surrounds
him. He always needs what she gives him.
He must always have regard to the laws
which he finds operating through her
realm. He always finds it
_ *" ^ the easiest course to obey, and
of Natur ^° ^^^ rather than to attempt
to resist her.
Here let me pause to notice a remark-
able contrast between the earlier and the
later stages of man's relations to Nature.
In the earlier stages he lies helpless before
her, and must take what she chooses
to bestow — food, shelter, materials for
clothing, means of defence against the
wild beasts, who are in streng'th far more
than a match for him. He depends upon
her from necessity, and is better or
worse off according as she is more or less
generous.
But in the later stages of his progress
he has, by accumulating a store of know-
ledge, and by the development of his intel-
ligence, energy, and self-confidence, raised
himself out of his old difficulties. He
no longer dreads the wild beasts. They,
or such of them as remain, begin to
dread him, for he is crafty, and can kill
them at a distance. He erects dwellings
which can withstand rain and tempest.
He irrigates hitherto barren lands and
raises abundant crops from them. When
he has invented machinery, he produces
in an hour clothing better than his hands
could formerly have produced in a week.
If at any given time he has not plenty
of food, this happens only because he has
allowed his sf)ecies to multiply too fast.
He is able to cross the sea against
adverse winds and place himself in a more
fertile soil or under more genial
skies than those of his former
home. As respects all the
primary needs of his life, he
has so subjected Nature to himself, that
he can make his life what he will.
All this renders him independent. But
he now also finds himself drawn into a new
kind of dependence, for he has now
come to take a new view of Nature. He
perceives in her an enormous storehouse
of wealth, by using which he can multiply
Man's
Advance in
Knowledge
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Man the
Master
of Nature
his resources and gratify his always
increasing desires to an extent practically
unlimited. She provides forces, such as
steam and electricity, which his knowledge
enables him to employ for production and
transj:)ort, so as to spare his own physical
strength, needed now not so much for
effort as for the direction of the efforts of
Nature. She has in the forest,
and still more beneath her own
surface in the form of minerals,
the materials by which these
forces can be set in motion ; and by using
these forces man can, with comparatively
little trouble, procure abundance of those
materials.
Thus his relation to Nature is changed.
It was that of a servant, or, indeed, rather
of a beggar, needing the bounty of a
sovereign. It is now that of a master
needing the labour of a servant, a servant
infinitely stronger than the master, but
absolutely obedient to the master so long
as the master uses the proper spell. Thus
the connection of man with Nature,
changed though his attitude be, is really
as close as ever, and far more complex.
If his needs had remained what they were
in his primitive days — let us say, in those
palc'eolithic days which we can faintly
adumbrate to ourselves by an observation
of the Australian or Fuegian aborigines
now — he would have sat comparatively
lightly to Nature, getting easily what he
wanted, and not caring to trouble her for
n;ore. But his needs — that is to say, his
desires, both his physical appetites and
his intellectual tastes, his ambitions and
his fondness for comfort, things that were
once luxuries having become necessaries —
have so immeasurably expanded that, since
he asks much more from Nature, he is
obliged to study her more closely than ever.
Thus he enters into a new sort of
dependence upon her, because it is only
by understanding her capacities and
llic nuans of using them that he can get
^M . .., from her what he wants.
Man s New rt ■ •^- j.- n j
„ , ,. Frunitive man was satisfied
j^ it he could nnd spots where
the trees gave edible fruit,
where the sun was not too hot, nor
the winds too cold, where the beasts easy
of capture were abundant, and no tigers
or pythons made the forest terrible.
Civilised man has more complex problems
to deal with, and wider fields to search.
The study of Nature is not only still
essential to him, but really more essential
i8
than ever. His hfe and action are con-
ditioned by her. His industry and his
commerce are directed by her to certain
spots. That which she has to give is
still, directly or indirectly, the source of
strife, and a frequent cause of war. As
men fought long ago with flint-headed
arrows for a spring of water or a coconut
grove, so they fight to-day for mineral
treasures imbedded in the soil. It is
mainly by Nature that the movements of
emigration and the rise of populous centres
of industry are determined.
Though Nature still rules for many
purposes and in many ways the course
of human affairs, the respective value of
her various gifts changes from age to age,
as man's knowledge and power of turning
them to account have changed. The
things most prized by primitive man are'
not those which semi-civilised man chiefly
prized, still less are they those most sought
for now.
In primitive times the spots most
attractive, because most favourable to
human life, were those in which food
could be most easily and safely obtained
from fruit-bearing trees or by the chase,
and where the climate was
N^T^ genial enough to make clothing
yr ... and shelter needless, at least
during the greater part of the
year. Later, when the keeping of cattle
and tillage had come into use, good pastures
and a fertile soil in the valley of a river
were the chief sources of material well-
being. Wild beasts were less terrible,
because man was better armed ; but as
human enemies were formidable, regions
where hills and rocks facilitated defence by
furnishing natural strongholds had their
advantages.
Still later, forests came to be recognised
as useful for fuel, and for carpentry and
shipbuilding. Mineral deposits, usually
found in hilly or mountainous districts,
became pre-eminently important sources
of wealth ; and rivers were valued as
highways of commerce and as sources of
motive power by the force of their currents.
To the Red Indians of the Ohio valley
the places which were the most attractive
camping-grounds were those whither the
buffaloes came in vast herds to lick the
rock salt exposed in the sides of the hills.
It is now not the salt-licks, but the existence
of immense deposits of coal and iron, that
have determined the growth of huge com-
munities in those regions whence the red
INTRODUCTION BY RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
man and the buffalo have both vanished.
England was once, as New Zealand is now,
a great wool-growing and wool-exporting
country, whereas she is to-day a country
which spins and weaves far more wool
than she produces.
So, too, the influence of the sea on man
has changed. There was a time when
towns were built upon heights some way
off from the coast, because the sea was
the broad high road of pirates who swooped
down upon and pillaged the dwellings of
those who lived near it. Now that the
sea is safe, trading cities spring up upon
its margin, and sandy tracts worthless for
agriculture have gained an unexpected
value as health resorts, or as places for
playing games, places to which the in-
habitants of inland districts flock in
summer, as they do in England and
Germany, or in winter, as they do on the
Mediterranean coasts of France. The
Greeks, when they began to compete with
the Phoenicians in maritime commerce,
sought for small and sheltered inlets in
which their tiny vessels could lie safely —
such inlets as Homer describes in the
Odyssey, or as the Old Port of Marseilles,
. a city originally a colony from
Harbours *^^ Ionian Phocaea. Nowadays
Y»#"j^ these pretty little rock har-
and Modern , ^ -^ , r ji i
bours are useless tor the large
ships which carry our trade. The Old
Port of Marseilles is abandoned to small
coasters and fishing-boats, and the ocean
steamers lie in a new harbour which is
protected, partly by outlying islands,
partly by artificial works.
So, too, river valleys, though still
important as highways of traffic, are
important not so much in respect of water
carriage as because they furnish the
easiest hues along which railways can be
constructed. The two banks of the Rhine,
each traversed by a railroad, carry far
more traffic than the great stream itself
carried a century ago ; and the same
remark applies to the Hudson. All these
changes are due to the progress of inven-
tion, which may give us fresh changes in
the future not less far-reaching than
those the past has seen. Mountainous
regions with a heavy rainfall, such as
Western Norway or the coast of the
Pacific in Washington and British Colum-
bia, may, by the abundance of water
power which they supply, which can
be transmuted into electrical energy,
become sources of previously unlooked-
for wealth, especially if some cheap means
can be devised of conveying electricity
with less wastage in transmission than is
at present incurred. Within the last few
years considerable progress in this direc-
tion has been made. Should effective
and easily applicable preventives against
malarial fever be discovered, many dis-
TK w \A *^^^^s "ow shunned, because
- ^ ^ ' dangerous to the life of white
Importance ° , ,\. ■> i
txM i- • men, mav become the homes of
of Medicine „ ■ ^ ■' -i- t-l
fiounshmg communities. Ihe
discovery of cinchona bark in the seven-
teenth century affected the course of
events, because it provided a remedy
against a disease that had previously
baffled medical skill. If quinine had been
at the disposal of the men of the Middle
Ages, not only might the lives of many
great men, as for instance of Dante, have
been prolonged, but the Teutonic emperors
would have been partially relieved of one
of the chief obstacles which prevented
them from establishing permanent control
over their Italian dominions. Rome and
the Papal power defended themselves
against the hosts of the Franconian and
Hohenstaufen sovereigns by the fevers of
the Campagna more effectively than did
the Roman people by their arms, and
almost as effectively as did the Popes by
their spiritual thunders.
Bearing in mind this principle, that the
gifts of Nature to man not only increase,
but also vary in their form, in proportion
and correspondence to man's caj^acity to
use them, and remembering also that man-
is almost as much influenced by Nature
when he has become her adroit master
as when she was his stern mistress, we
may now go on to examine more in detail
the modes in which her influence has told
and still tells upon him.
It has long been recognised that Nature
must have been the principal factor in
producing, that is to say, in differentiating,
the various races of mankind as we find
them differentiated when our
records begin. How this hap-
pened is one of the darkest
problems that history presents.
By what steps and through what causes
did the races of man acquire these
diversities of physical and intellectual
character which are now so marked
and seem so persistent ? It has been
suggested that some of these diversities
may date back to a time when man, as
what is called a distinct species, had
The Problem
of Racial
Distinctions
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
scarcely begun to exist. Assuming the
Darwinian hypothesis of the development
of man out of some pithecoid form to be
correct — and those who are not them-
selves scientific naturalists can of course
do no more than provisionally accept the
conclusions at which the vast majority of
scientific naturalists have arrived — it is
conceivable that
there may have
been unconnected
developments of
creatures from
i n t ermediate
forms into de-
finitely human
forms in differ-
ent regions, and
that some of
the most marked
types of humanity
may therefore
have had their
first rudimentary
and germinal be-
ginning before
any specifically
human type had
made its appear-
a n c e . This,
however, is not
the view of the
great majority of
naturalists. They
appear to hold
that the j^assage
either from some
anthropoid apes,
or from some
long since extinct
common ancestor
of man and the
existing anthro-
poid apes — this
latter alternative
representing whai
IS now the domi-
nant view — did
not take j)lace
through several
channels (so to
speak), but
through one only, and that there was
a single specifically human type which
subsequently diverged into the varieties
we now see.
If this be so, it is plain that climate, and
the conditions of life which depend upon
climate, soil, and the presence of vegetables
20
TREE DWELLERS
We must remember that such terms as "The Stone Age," "The
Bronze Age," and so forth, are only loosely applied. The ages so
called did not close at certain periods. There are races now
living in all the conditions of these past ages. This photograph,
for example, shows the actual tree dwellings of the Papuans in New
Guinea to-day -one of the most primitive forms of human habitation.
and of other animals besides man, must
have been the forces which moulded and
developed those varieties. From a remote
antiquity, everybody has connected the
dark colour of all, or nearly all, the races
inhabiting the torrid zone with the power
of the sun ; and the fairer skin of the
races of the temperate and arctic zones
with the com-
parative feeble-
ness of his rays
in tho.se regions.
This may be ex-
j)lained on Dar-
winian principles
by supposing
that the darker
varieties were
found more
capable of sup-
porting the fierce
heat of the
tropics. What
explanation is to
be given of the
other character-
istics of the negro
and negroid
races, of the
usually frizzled
hair, of the pecu-
liar nose and jaw,
and so forth, is
a question foi
the naturalist
rather than for
the historian. Al-
though climate
and food may be
the chief factors
in differentiation,
the nature of the
process is, as in-
deed is the case
with the species
of animals gene-
rally, sometimes
very obscure.
Take an in-
stance from three
African races
which, so far as
we can tell, were formed under similar
climatic conditions — the Bushmen, the
Hottentots, and the Bantu, the race
including those whom we call Kafhrs.
Their physical aspect and colour are
different. Their size and the structure
of their bodies are different. Their mental
THE HABITATIONS OF MAN IN ALL AGES OF THE WORLD'S HISTORY
At first man built twig huts in trees, but becoming better matched with his animal foes he took to caves and under-
ground habitations. Our illustration of the latter shows a section through the soil. Lake dwellings marked a
distinct advance. Other varieties of primitive habitations are the leaf hut, the tents of skin, the mud hut, and the
beehive hut of stone. Roman villas are still models of beauty. American " skyscrapers " are pecuUar to our time ;
but all early forms of dwellings, while marking progress, have existed contemporaneously throughout history.
21
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
aptitudes are different ; and one of the
oddest points of difference is this, that
whereas the Bushmen are the least
advanced, intellectually, morally, and
politically, of the three races, as well
as the physically weakest, they show
a talent for drawing which is not
possessed by the other two.
In this case there is, of
Is the Race ^Q^j-gg^ ^ vast unknown fore-
. ^^\^V, o time during which we may
Insoluble? ■ .1 T, ^
nnagme the Bantu race, pro-
bably originally formed in a region
other than that which it now occupies
(and under more favourable conditions
for progress), to have become widely
differentiated from those which are
now the lower African races. We still
know comparatively little about African
ethnography. Let us, therefore, take
another instance in which affinities of
language give ground for believing
that three races, whose differences
are now marked, haVe diverged from a
common stock. So far as language goes,
the Celts, the Teutons, and the Slavs,
all speaking Indo-European tongues, may
be deemed to be all nearly connected in
origin. They are marked by certain
slight physical dissimilarities, and by per-
haps rather more palpable dissimilarities in
their respective intellectual and emotional
characters. But so far as our knowledge
goes, all three have lived for an immensely
long period in the colder parts of the
temperate zone, under similar external
conditions, and following very much the
same kind of pastoral and agricultural hfe.
There is nothing in their environment
which explains the divergences we perceive;
so the origin of these divergences must
aj^parently be sought either in admixture
with other races or in some other historical
causes which are, and will for ever re-
main, in the darkness of a recordless past.
How race admixture works, and how
it forms a new definite character out of
. diverse elements, is a subject
ixing o which anyone may find abund-
the World s , i. ■ y ( . ^ ■
ant materials for studymg m
eop es ^j^^ history of the last two thou-
sand years. Nearly every modern Eurojwan
people has been .so formed. The French,
the Spaniards, and the English are all the
products of a mixture, in different pro-
portions, of at least three elements —
Iberian (to use a current name), Celts,
and Teutons, though the Celtic element
is probably comparatively small in Spain,
22
and the Teutonic comparatively small
both in Spain and in Central and Southern
France. No small part of those who to-
day speak German and deem themselves
Germans must be of Slavonic stock. Those
who to-day speak Russian are very largely
of Finnish, to some small extent of Tartar,
blood. The Itahans probably spring from
an even larger number of race-sources,
without mentioning the vast number of
slaves brought from the East and the North
into Italy between B.C. loo and a.d. 300.
In the cases of Switzerland and Scotland
the process of fusion is not yet complete.
The Celto-Burgundian Swiss of Neuchatel
is still different from the Allemanian
Swiss of Appenzcll ; as the Anglo-Celt
of Fife is different from the Ibero-Celt of
the Outer Hebrides. But in both these
cases there is already a strong sense of
national unity, and in another three
hundred years there may have arisen a
single type of character.
An interesting and almost unique case
is furnished by Iceland, where isolation
under peculiar conditions of climate, food,
and social life has created a somewhat
different type both of body and of mental
. character from that of the
The Unique J^;oI.wegians, although so far as
f*i^ . blood goes the two peoples are
identical, Iceland having been
colonised from Western Norway a thousand
years ago, and both Icelanders and Nor-
wegians having remained practically un-
mixed with any other race — save that some
slight Celtic infusion came to Iceland
with those who migrated thither from the
Norse settlements in Ireland, Northern
Scotland, and the Hebrides — since the
separation took place. But by far the
most remarkable instance of race admixture
is that furnished in our own time by the
United States of North America, where
a people of predominantly English stock
(although there were in the end of the
eighteenth century a few descendants of
Dutchmen, with Germans, Swedes, and
Ulster Irishmen, in the country) has
within the last sixty years received
additions of many millions of Celts, of
Germans and Scandinavians, and of
various Slavonic races. At least a
century must elapse before it can be
seen how far this infusion of new blood
will change the type of American
character as it stood in 1840.
There are, however, two noteworthy
differences between modern race fusions
INTRODUCTION BY RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
and those which belong to primitive times.
One is that under modern conditions
the influence of what may be called the
social and political environment is probably
very much greater than it was in early
times. The American-born son of Irish
parents is at forty years of age a very
different creature from his cousin on the
coast of Mayo. The other is that in modern
times differences of colour retard or forbid
the fusion of two races. So far as the Teu-
tonic peoples are concerned, no one will
intermarry with a
negro ; a very few
with a Hindu, a
Chinese, or a Malay.
In the ancient world
there was but little
contact between white
men and black or
yellow ones, but the
feeling of race aver-
sion was ap-
parently less
strong than it
of their movements from one part of the
earth to another, these movements having
been in their turn a potent influence in
the admixture of the races. Some geo-
graphers have alleged climate — that is to
say, the desire of those who inhabit an
inclement region to enjoy a softer and
warmer air — as a principal motive which
has induced tribes of nations to transfer
themselves from one region to another.
It is no doubt true that the direction of
migrations has almost always been either
from the north towards
the south, or else along
parallels of latitude,
men rarely seeking for
themselves conditions
more severe than those
under which they were
born. But it is usually
not so much the wish
to escape cold that has
been an effective
motive as the
wish to find
THE REMARKABLE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT ON PHYSICAL APPEARANCE
Mr. Bryce points out that the physical features of a people are determined chiefly by their environment. These
illustrations show (at top) a typical English settler in the old Colonial days of America, a native Red Indian (left) and a
typical American of to-day (right). Without any intermingling of red men and white, the modern American, thanks to
climatic conditions, resembles the Red Indian far more closely than he does his own ancestors of the Colonial days.
is now, just as it was much less strong
among the Spaniards and Portuguese
in the sixteenth and .seventeenth centuries
than it is among Americans or English-
men to-day. It is less strong even now
among the so-called " Latin races ; " and
as regards the Anglo-Americans, it is
much less strong towards the Red Indians
than towards negroes.
As Nature must have been the main
agent in the formation of the various
races of mankind from a common stock,
so also Nature has been the chief cause
more and better food, since this means an
altogether easier life. Scarcity of the means
of subsistence, which is, of course, most
felt when population is increasing, has
operated more frequently and ]')owerfully
than any other cause in bringing on dis-
placements of the races of man over the
globe. The movement of the primitive
Aryans into India from the plateaux of
West Central Asia, probably also the
movement of the races which speak
Dravidian languages from South Central
Asia into Southern India, and probably
23
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
also the mighty descent, in the tourth and
fifth centuries A.D., of the Teutonic races
from the lands between the Baltic and
the Alps into the Roman Empire, had
this origin.
In more advanced states of society a
like cause leads the surplus population of
a civilised state to overflow into new
lands, where there is more
_ ^ . . space, or the soil is more fertile.
o onising -pj^yg ^YiQ inhabitants of South-
western Scotland, partly, no
doubt, at the suggestion of their rulers,
crossed over into Ulster, where they occu-
pied the best lands, driving the aboriginal
Celts into the rougher and higher districts,
where their descendants remain in the
glens of Antrim, and in the hilly parts of
Down, Derry, and Tyrone. Thus the men
of New England moved out to the West
and settled in the Mississippi Valley, while
the men of Virginia crossed the AUeghanies
into Kentucky. Thus the English have
colonised Canada and Australia and New
Zealand and Natal. Thus the Russians
have spread out from their ancient homes
on the upper courses of the Dnieper and
the Volga all over the vast steppes that
stretch to the Black Sea and the Caucasus,
as well as into the rich lands of South-
western Siberia. Thus the surplus peasantry
of Germany has gone not only to North
America, but also to Southern Brazil and
the shores of the Rio de la Plata.
In another form it is the excess of popu-
lation over means of subsistence at home
that has produced the remarkable outflow
of the Chinese through the Eastern
Archipelago and across the Pacific into
North America, and that has carried the
Ja{)ancse to the Hawaiian Islands. And
here we touch another cause of migration
which is indirectly traceable to Nature —
namely, the demand in some countries
for more labour or cheaper labour than the
inhabitants of the country -are able or
willing to supply. Sometimes this demand
^, -, , is attributable to climatic
I he Need tu o ■ j j
j^ . causes. I he Spaniards and
, . Portuguese and English in the
New World were unfitted by
their physical constitutions for out-of-door
labour under a tropical sun. Hence they
im]>ortcd negroes during the sixteenth and
two following centuries in such numbers
that there are now about eight millions
of coloured people in the United States
alone, and possibly (though no accurate
figures exist) as many more in the West
24
Indies and South America. To a much
smaUer extent the same need for foreign
labour has recently brought Indian coolies
to the shores of the Caribbean Sea, and to
the hottest parts of Natal, as it brings
Polynesians to the sugar plantations
of Northern Queensland.
Two other causes which have been
potent in bringing about displacements
and mixtures of population are the desire
for conquest and plunder and the senti-
ment of religion. But these belong less
to the sphere of Nature than to that of
human passion and emotion, so that they
' scarcely fall within this part of our
inquiry, the aim of which has been to
show how Nature has determined history
by inducing a shifting of races from
place to place. From this shifting there
has come the contact of diverse elements,
with changes in each race due to the
influence of the other, or perhaps the ab-
sorption of one in the other, or the develop-
ment of something new out of both. In
considering these race movements we
have been led from the remote periods in
which they began, and of which we know
scarcely anything except from archaeologi-
cal and linguistic data, to
• * T^ ^^ periods within the range of
mines Race ,i .■ 1 • . o
„ ^ authentic history. So we
Movements , ■', xt ^
may go on to see how Nature
has determined the spots in which the
industry of the more advanced races
should build up the earliest civilisations,
and the lines along which commerce, a
principal agent in the extension of
civilisation, should proceed to link one
race with another.
It was long since observed that the
first homes of a dense population and a
highly developed civilisation lay in fertile
river valleys, such as those of the Lower
Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the
Ganges, the Yang-tse-kiang. All these
are situate in the hotter parts of the
temperate zone ; all are regions of ex-
ceptional fertility. The soil, especially
when tillage has become general, is the
first source of wealth ; and it is in the
midst of a prosperous agricultural jwpula-
tion that cities spring up where handi-
crafts and the arts arise and flourish.
The basins of the Lower Nile and of the
Lower luii:)hrates and Tigris are (as
respects the West Asiatic and Mediter-
ranean world) the fountain-heads of
material, military, and artistic civihsa-
tion. From them it spreads over the
The earliest agents in the diffusion of trades and the arts were the Phoenicians, who from their great cities/
Sidon, and Carthage conducted a sea-borne traffic with lands as remote as England, and whose ad^
sailors, despite the smallness of their vessels, are believed even to have succeeded in rounding the Cape of y
^1
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
adjacent countries and along the coasts
of Europe and Africa. On the east,
Egypt and Mesopotamia are cut off by
the deserts of Arabia and Eastern Persia
from the perhaps equally ancient civilisa-
tion of India, which again is cut off by
lofty and savage mountains from the very
ancient civilisation of China. Nature
forbade intercourse between these far
eastern regions and the West Asian
peoples, while on the other hand Nature
permitted Egypt, Phoenicia, and Babylon
to influence and become teachers of the
peoples of Asia Minor and of the Greeks
on both sides of the i^gean Sea. The
isolation and consequent independent
development of India and of China is one
of the most salient and significant facts
of history. It was not till the end of the
fifteenth century, when the Portuguese
reached the Malabar coast, that the
Indian peoples began to come into the
general movement of the world ; for the
expedition of Alexander the Great left
hardly any permanent result, except upon
Buddhist art, and the conquests of
Mahmud of Ghazni opened no road to
the East from the Mediter-
ranean West. Nor did China,
Isolation
of Eastern
Peoples
though visited by Italian
travellers in the thirteenth
century, by Portuguese traders and Jesuit
missionaries in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth, come into effective contact with
Europe till near our own time.
As the wastes of barren land formed an
almost impassable eastern boundary to
the West Asian civihsations, so on the
west the expanse of sea brought Egypt
and to a less extent Assyria (through
Phoenicia) into touch with all the peoples
who dwelt on the shores of the Mediter-
ranean. The first agents in the diffusion
of trade and the arts were the Phoenicians,
established at Tyre, Sidon, and Carthage.
The next were the Greeks. For more
than two thousand years, from B.C. 700
onwards, the Mediterranean is practically
the centre of the history of the world,
because it is the highway both of com-
merce and of war. For seven hundred years
after the end of the second century B.C.,
that is to say, while the Roman Empire
remained strong, it was also the highway
of civil administration. The Saracen con-
quests of the seventh century cut off
North Africa and Syria from Europe,
a. checked transmarine commerce, and
figrreated afresh the old opjwsition of East
2426
and West in which a thousand years
earlier Herodotus had found the main
thread of world history. But it was
not till after the discovery of America
that the Mediterranean began to yield
to the Atlantic its primacy as the area of
sea power and sea-borne trade.
Bordered by far less fertile and climate-
- „ favoured countries, and closed
Influence , • .• , -
of the Seas *° navigation during some
. „. months of winter, the Baltic
has always held a place in his-
tory far below that of the Mediterranean.
Yet it has determined the relations of the
North European states and peoples. So,
too, the North Sea has at one time exposed
Britain to attack from the Danish and
Norwegian lords of the sea, and at other
times protected her from powerful con-
tinental enemies. It may indeed be said
that in surrounding Europe by the sea
on three sides. Nature has drawn the
main lines which the course of events on
this smallest but most important of the
continents has had to follow.
Of the part which the great bodies of
water have played, of the significance in
the oceans of mighty currents like the
Gulf Stream, the Polar Current, the Japan
Current, the Mozambique Current, it
would be impossible to speak within
reasonable compass. But two remarks
may be made before leaving this part of
the subject. One is that man's action
in cutting through an isthmus may
completely alter the conditions as given
by Nature. The Suez Canal has of late
years immensely enhanced the importance
of the Mediterranean, already in some
degree restored by the decay of Turkish
power, by the industrial revival of Italy,
and by the French conquests in North
Africa. The cutting of a canal at Panama
will change the relations of the seafaring
and fleet-owning nations that are interested
in the Atlantic and the Pacific. And the
other remark is that the significance of a
maritime discovery, however
Magellan ^^^^^ ^^ ^^^^^^ ^^y bg^ome still
PoHti« """ greater with the lapse of time.
Magellan, in his ever memo-
rable voyage, not only penetrated to and
crossed the Pacific, but discovered the
Philij^pine Islands, and claimed them for
the monarch who had sent him forth.
His apjiropriation of them for the Crown
of Spain, to which during these three
centuries and a half they have brought
no benefit, has been the cause which has
HOW NATURE DETERMINES THE SITES OF CITIES
Most towns and communities founded more than 300 years ago were on easily defensible hUls
Port Id^hnf «^f' m"^^",'. °' ''K% °^ *'^^ ^^^- O"-- iUustrations show (r) Naples zrBonsuna,
Port and hill of Marseilles, (4) Monaco, (5) St. Ct^zaire, and (6) the Greek Monastery of St.
Photos, by Frith and Underwood & Underwood
by the
(3} Old
Balaam.
2;
k^/ij
'^:::^.
'' ' ii V" 5o6ntA«» ; • ..
■.«A..;--...l->fTa ■ ■" '■"'* ' *"
Dtoltitiil
Ar t Phili
THE SHIFTING OF THE CENTRE OF THE WORLDS COMMERCE
These two maps, which have been very carefully prepared from the most reliable authorities, indicate at a glance the rela-
tive importance of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic as highways of commerce in the time of Julius Caesar, B.C. 102-44.
led the republic of the United States
to depart from its traditional policy of
holding to its own continent by taking
them a.s a prize — a distant and unex-
pected prize — of conquest.
A few words may sufftce as to what
Nature has done towards the formation of
nations and States by the configuration of
the surface of the dry land — that is to say,
28
by mountain chains and by river valleys.
The only natural boundaries, besides
seas, are mountains and deserts. Rivers,
though convenient frontier lines for the
politician or the geographer, are not
natural boundaries, but rather unite than
dissever those who dwell on their opposite
banks. Thus the great natural boundaries
in Asia have been the deserts of Eastern
;,.-*;.
■■V-.aIU, ..-•^^-;'".--.-.. W ^•■,<^ .^^'^■.<- J^.-//-/ r/ *"""";'
:Mqdet'<i>.W:: / /X _
PACIFIC
ri^Kir.^'-"-
•■^ ^^^//\v,\^ %X /^/ (Ml? l^^iH^i^^'-^
R u
•'*^- 1
<^<r.M<iJ^-
:7 Lr.o./o ^ S-'^SiSL '^'^^*'*SJ!''^!^*'54<:
^> v?^
6.'£ /R C /< 5 if /=
Va/«l^]|
HOW THE MEDITERRANEAN HAS GIVEN PLACE TO THE ATLANTIC
Here is the contrast to the opposite page. In our time the Atlantic has become the centre of the world's commerce and
the Mediterranean has sunk in importance. It would be almost deserted but for the routes to India via the Suez Canal.
Persia, of Turkestan, and of Northern
Arabia, with the long Himalayan chain
and the savage ranges apparently parallel
to the Iravvadi River, which separate the
easternmast corner of India and Burmah
from South-Western China. To a less
extent the Altai and Thian Shan, and, to a
still smaller extent, the Taurus in Eastern
Asia Minor, have tended to divide peoples
and States. The Caucasus, which fills the
space between two great seas, has been at
all times an extremely important factor in
history, severing the nomad races of Scy-
thia from the more civihsed and settled
inhabitants of the valleys of the Phasis
and the Kura. Even to-day, when the
29
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Tsar holds sway on both sides of this chain,
it constitutes a weakness in the position of
Russia, and it helps to keep the Georgian
races to the south from losing their iden-
tity in the mass of Russian subjects.
Without the Alps and the Pyrenees, the
annals of Europe must have been entirely
different. The Alps, even more than the
Italian climate, proved too
The Place ^^^^j^ ^^^ ^-^^ Romano-Ger-
of Mountains ^^^^-^ Emperors of the Middle
in H.Story ^^^^^ ^^j^^ ^^.j^^ ^^ ^.^j^ ^^^^
to the north and to the south of this wide
mountain region. The Pyrenees have not
only kept in existence the Basque people,
but have repeatedly frustrated the attempts
of monarchs to dominate both France and
Spain. The mass of high moorland country
which covers most of the space between
the Solvvay Firth and the lower course of
the Tweed has had something to do with
the formation of a Scottish nation out of
singularly diverse elements. The rugged
mountains of Northern and Western
Scotland, and the similar though less
extensive hill country of Wales, have en-
abled Celtic races to retain their language
and character in both these regions.
On the other hand, the vast open plains
of Russia have allowed the Slavs of the
districts which lie round Novgorod, Mos-
cow, and Kiev to spread out among and
Russify the Lithuanian and Finnish, to
some extent also the Tartar, races, who
originally held by far the larger part of that
area. So, too, the Ural range, which,
though long, is neither high nor difficult
to pass, has opposed no serious obstacle to
the overflow of population from Russia
into Siberia. That in North America the
.Alleghanies have had a comparatively
slight effect upon })olitical history, although
they did for a time arrest the march of
colonisation, is due partly to the fact that
they are a mass of comi)aratively low
parallel ranges, with fertile valleys be-
tween, partly to the already advanced civi-
lisation of the Anglo-Ameri-
cans of the Atlantic seaboard,
who found no great difficulty
in making their way across,
against the uncertain resistance of small
and non-cohesive Indian tribes. A far more
formidable natural barrier is formed be-
tween the Mississip])i Valley and the Pacific
slope by the Rocky Mountains, with the de-
serts of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.
But the discovery of steam power has so
much reduced the importance of this barrier
30
What
Steam-power
has Done
that it does not seriously threaten the main-
tenance of a united American republic.
In one respect the New World presents
a remarkable contrast to the Old. The
eirliest civilisations of the latter seem to
have sprung up in fertile river valleys.
Those of the former are found not on the
banks of streams like the Nile or Euphra-
tes, but on elevated plateaux, where the
heat of a tropical sun is mitigated by
height above sea level. It was in the lofty
lake basin of Tezcuco and Mexico, and on
the comparatively level ground which lies
between the parallel ranges of the Peruvian
and Bolivian Andes, that American races
had reached their finest intellectual deve-
lopment, not in the far richer, but also
hotter and less healthy river valleys of
Brazil, or (unless we are to except Yucatan)
on the scorching shores of the Caribbean
Sea. Nature was in those regions too strong
for man, and held him down in savagery.
In determining the courses of great
rivers, Nature has determined the first
highways of trade and fixed the sites of
many cities. Nearly all the considerable
towns founded more than three centuries
ago owe their origin either to their pos^
„ ^, sessing good havens on the
How Nature ^^^.^^^^^ ^^ ^o the natural
fixes oites , iu r ^i • -a-
J. ^. . strength of their })osition on
a defensible hill, or to their
standing close to a navigable river. Mar-
seilles, Alexandria, New York, Rio de
Janeiro, are instances of the first ; Athens,
Edinburgh, Prague, Moscow, of the second ;
Bordeaux, Cologne, New Orleans, Calcutta,
of the third. Rome and London, Buda-
pest, and Lyons combine the advantages
of the second with those of the third. This
function of rivers in directing the hnes of
commerce and the growth of centres of popu-
lation has become much less important
since the construction of railroads, yet
population tends to stay where it has been
first gathered, so that the fluviatile cities
are likely to retain their preponderance.
Thus the river is as important to the his-
torian as is the mountain range or the sea.
From the j:)hysical features of a country
it is an easy transition to the capacities
of the soil. The character of the products
of a region determines the numbers of its
inhabitants and the kind of life they lead.
A land of forests breeds hunters or lumber-
men ; a land of pasture, which is too
rough or too arid or too sterile for tillage,
supports shepherds or herdsmen probably
more or less nomadic. Either kind of land
INTRODUCTION BY RT. HON. VF COUNT BRYCE
supports inhabitants few in proportion to
its area. Fertile and well-watered regions
rear a denser, a more settled, and presum-
ably a more civilised population. Norway
and Tyrol, Tibet and Wyoming, and the
Orange River Colony, can never become so
densely peopled as Bengal or Illinois or
Lombardy, yet the fisheries of its coast and
the seafaring energy of its people
have sensibly increased the po-
J* pulation of Norway. Thus he
who knows the climate and the
productive capacity of the soil of any
given country can calculate its prospects
of prosperity. Political causes may, of
course, intervene. Asia Minor and the
Valley of the Euphrates, regions once
populous and flourishing, are now thinly
inhabited and poverty-stricken because
they are ruled by the Turks.
But these cases are exceptional. Bengal
and Lombardy and Egypt have supported
large populations under all kinds of govern-
ment. The products of each country tend,
moreover, to establish definite relations
between it and other countries, and do this
all the more as population, commerce, and
the arts advance. When England was a
great wool-growing and wool-exporting
country, her wool export brought her into
close political connection with the wool-
manufacturing Flemish towns. She is now
a cotton-manufacturing country, needing
cotton which she cannot grow at all, and
consuming wheat which she does not
grow in sufficient quantities. Hence she is
in close commercial relations with the
United States on one side, which give her
most of her cotton and much of her wheat,
and with India, from which she gets both
these articles, and to which she exports
a large part of her manufactured cotton
goods.
So Rom.e, because she needed the corn
of Egypt, kept Egypt under a specially
careful administration. The rest of her
corn came from Sicily and North Africa,
and the Vandal conquest of
mmon js^orth Africa dealt a frightful
Needs make 1, , ,, j i- • t- •
- p blow to the dechnmg Empire.
In these cases the common
interest of sellers and buyers makes for
peace, but in other cases the competition
of countries desiring to keep commerce to
themselves occasions war. The Spanish
and Dutch fought over the trade to India
in the earlier part of the seventeenth cen-
tury, when the Portuguese Indies belonged
to Spain, as the EngUsh and French fought
in the eighteenth. And a nation, especially
an insular nation, whose arable soil is not
large enough or fertile enough to provide
all the food it needs, has a powerful induce-
ment either to seek peace or else to be
prepared for maritime war. If such a
country does not grow enough corn or
meat at home, she must have a navy
strong enough to make sure that she will
always be able to get these necessaries
from abroad. Attica did not produce all
the grain seeded to feed the Athenians,
so they depended on the corn ships which
came down from the Euxine, and were
practically at the mercy of an enemy who
could stop those ships.
Of another natural source of wealth, the
fisheries on the coast of a country, no
more need be said than that they have
been a frequent source of quarrels and even
of war. The recognition of the right of each
state to the exclusive control and enjoy-
ment of the sea for three miles off its shores
has reduced, but not entirely removed, the
causes of friction between the fishermen
of different countries.
Until recently, the surface of the soil
was a far more important
source of wealth than was that
which lies beneath the surface.
There were iron mines among
the Chalybes on the Asiatic coast of the
Euxine in ancient times ; there were silver
mines here and there, the most famous
being those at Laurium, from which the
Athenians drew large revenues, gold mines
in Spain and Dacia, copper mines in Elba,
tin mines in the south-west corner of
Britain. But the number of persons
employed in mining and the industries
connected therewith was relatively small
both in the ancient world and, indeed,
down till the close of the eighteenth cen-
tury. The immense development of coal-
mining and of iron-working in connection
therewith has now doubled, trebled, or
quadrupled the population of large areas
in Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, and
the United States, adding vastly to the
wealth of these countries and stimulating
in them the growth of many mechanical
arts. This new population is quite different
in character from the agricultural peasan-
try who in earlier days formed the principal
substratum of society. Its appearance has
changed the internal politics of these
countries, disturbing the old balance of
forces and accelerating the progress of
democratic principles.
31
Miner&ls
and
Civilisation
INTRODUCTION BY RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
Nor have minerals failed to affect the
international relations of peoples and
States. It was chiefly for the precious
metals that the Spaniards explored the
American Continent and conquered Mexico
and Peru. It was for the sake of capturing
the ships bringing those metals back
to Europe that the English sea-rovers made
their way to the American coasts and
involved England in wars with Spain.
It was the discovery in 1885 of extensive
auriferous strata unexampled in the cer-
tainty of their yield that drew a swarm
of foreign immigrants into the Transvaal,
whence arose those difficulties between
them and the Dutch inhabitants pre-
viously established there which, coupled
with the action of the wealthy owners of
the mines, led at last to the war of 1899
between Britain and the two South African
Republics.
The productive capacity of a country is,
however, in one respect very different from
those great physical features — such as tem-
perature, rainfall, coast configuration,
surface character, geological structure, and
river system — which have been previously
noted. Those features are
***'^'* permanent qualities which man
Fight with ^^^ ^^^^^ Qj^ly ^Q ^ hmited
Nature extent, as when he reduces the
rainfall a little by cutting down forests, or
increases it by planting them, or as when
he unites an isle, hke that of Cadiz, to
the mainland, cuts through an isthmus,
like that of Corinth, or clears away the
bar at a river mouth, as that of the
Mississippi has been cleared.
But the natural products of a country
may be exhausted and even the productive
capacity of its soil diminished. Constant
tillage, especially if the same crop be
raised and no manure added, will wear out
the richest soils. This has already hap-
pened in parts of Western America. Still
the earth is there ; and with rest and arti-
ficial help it will recover its strength. But
timber destroyed cannot always be induced
to grow again, or at least not so as to
equal the vigour of primeval forests. Wild
animals, once extirpated, are gone for ever.
The buffalo and beaver of North America,
the beautiful lynxes of South Africa and
some of its large ruminants, are irrecover-
ably lost for the purposes of human use,
just as much as the dinornis, though a few
individuals may be kept alive as specimens.
So, too, the mineral resources of a country
are not only consumable, but obviously
irreplaceable. Already some of the smaller
coalfields of Europe have been worked out,
while in others it has become necessary to
sink much deeper shafts, at an increas-
ing cost. There is not much tin left in
Cornwall, not much gold in the gravel
deposits of Northern California. The richest
known goldfield of the world, that of
the Transvaal Witwatersrand,
Exhausting ^^^ hardly last more than
the Mineral ^j^j^.^^ ^^ ^^^.^y y^^j.^^ j^^^ j^
Wealth ^ ^^^ centuries the productive
capacity of many regions may have be-
come quite different from what it is now,
with grave consequences to their inhabi-
tants.
These are some of the ways in which
Nature affects those economic, social, and
poHtical conditions of the life of man the
changes in which make up history. As
we have seen, that which Nature gives
to man is always the same, in so far as
Nature herself is always the same — an
expression which is more popular than
accurate, for Nature herself — that is to say,
not the laws of Nature, but the physical
environment of man on this planet — is in
reality always changing. It is true that
this environment changes so slowly
that a thousand years may be too
short a period in which man can note
and record some forms of change — such,
for instance, as that by which the tem-
perature of Europe became colder during
the approach of the glacial period and
warmer during its recession — while ten
thousand years maybe too short to note
any diminution in the heat which the
sun pours upon the earth, or in the store
of oxygen which the earth's atmosphere
holds.'
But as we have also seen, the relation to
man of Nature's gifts differs from age to age
as man himself becomes different, and as
his power of using these gifts increases, or
his need of them becomes either less or
greater. Every invention alters those rela-
tions. Water power became less
Progress relatively valuable when steam.
of Modern ^^^^ applied to the generation
Invention ^^ motive force. It has become
more valuable with the new apphcations of
electricity. With the discovery of mineral
dyes, indigo and cochineal are now less
wanted than they were. With the inven-
tion of the pneumatic tyre for bicycles
and carriages, caoutchouc is more wanted.
Mountains have become, since the mak-
ing of railways, less of an obstacle to trade
33
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
than they were, and they have also be-
come more available as health resorts.
Political circumstances may interfere
with the ordinary and normal action
of natural phenomena. A race may be
attracted to or driven into a region for
which it is not physically suited, as Euro-
peans have gone to the West Indies,
^ - and negroes were once carried
an anno -^^^ New York and Pennsyl-
Disregard ~, r i. j
j^ vania. Ihe course of trade
which Nature prescribes be-
tween different countries may be ham-
pered or stopped by protective tariffs ;
but in these cases Nature usually takes
her eventual revenges. They are in-
stances which show, not that man can
disregard her, but that when he does so,
he does so to his own loss.
It would be easy to add further illustra-
tions, but those already given are sufficient
to indicate how multiform and pervading
is the action upon man of the physical
environment, or in other words, how in all
countries, and at all times, geography
is the necessary foundation of history, so
that neither the course of a nation's
growth, nor its relations with other nations,
can be grasped by one who has not
come to understand the climate, surface,
and products of the country wherein
that nation dwells.
This conception of the relation of geo-
graphy to history is, as has been said,
the leading idea of the present work, and
has furnished the main lines which it
follows. It deals with history in the light
of physical environment. Its ground
plan, so to speak, is primarily geographi-
cal, and secondarily chronological. But
there is one difficulty in the way of such
a scheme, and of the use of such a ground
j)lan, which cannot be passed over. That
difficulty is suggested by the fact already
noted — that hardly any considerable race,
and possibly no great nation, now in-
habits the particular part of the earth's
surface on which it was dwell-
There IS 1 v- . 1 •
,, . . nig when a history begins.
no Unmixed -'^ - . -? P.
Race left
Nearly every peoj)le has either
migrated bodily from one
region to another, or has received such
large infusions of immigrants from other
regions as to have become practically a
new people. Hence it is rare to find any
nation now living under the physical con-
ditions which originally moulded its char-
acter, or the character of some at least
of its component elements. And hence it
34
follows that when we study the qualities,
aptitudes, and institutions of a nation in
connection with the land it inhabits, we
must always have regard not merely to
the features of that land, but also to
those of the land which was its earlier
dwelling-place. Obviously, this brings
a disturbing element into the study of
the relations between land and people,
and makes the whole problem a far more
compHcated one than it appeared at first
sight.
Where a people has migrated from a
country whose physical conditions were
similar to those under which its later life
is spent, or where it had reached only a
comparatively low stage of economic and
political development before the migra-
tion, the difficulties arising from this
source are not serious. The fact that the
English came into Britain from the lands
round the mouth of the Elbe is not
very material to an inquiry into their re-
lations to their new home, because climate
and soil were similar, and the emigrants
were a rude, warlike race. But when we
come to the second migration of the English,
, from Britain to North America,
a ure s ^j^^ ^^^ ^^ altogether dif-
P terent. Groups ot men from
a people which had already
become highly civilised, had formed a
well-marked national character, and had
created a body of peculiar institutions,
planted themselves in a country whose
climate and physical features are widely
diverse from those of Britain.
If, for the sake of argument, we assume
the Algonquin aborigines of Atlantic North
America as they were in a.d. iOoo to have
been the legitimate product of their
physical environment — I say " for the
sake of argument," because it may be
alleged that other forces than those of
physical environment contributed to form
them — what greater contrast can be
imagined than the contrast between the
inhabitants of New England in this present
year and the inhabitants of the same
district three centuries earlier, as Nature,
and Nature alone, had turned them out of
her factory ? Plainly, therefore, the history
of the United States cannot, so far as
Nature and geography are concerned, be
written with regard solely, or even chiefly,
to the conditions of North American na-
ture. The physical environment in which
the English immigrants found themselves
on that continent has no doubt affected
INTRODUCTION BY RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
their material progress and the course of
their politics during the three centuries
that have elapsed since settlements were
founded in Virginia and on Massachusetts
Bay.
But it is not to that environment, but
to earlier days, and especially to the twelve
centuries during which their ancestors
lived in England, that their character and
institutions are to be traced. Thus the
history of the American people begins in
the forests of Germany, where the foun-
dations of their polity were laid, and is
continued in England, where they set up
kingdoms, embraced Christianity, became
one nation, received an influx of Celtic,
Danish, and Norman-French blood, for-
med for themselves that body of customs,
laws, and institutions which they trans-
planted to the new soil of America, and
most of which, though changed and always
changing, they still retain. The same
thing is true of the Spaniards (as also of
the Portuguese) in Central and South
America. The difference be-
Bcginnmgs ^^^^^^^ ^-^^ development of the
of Race Hispano-Americans and that of
History ^^^-^ Enghsh neighbours to the
north is not wholly, or even mainly, due to
the different physical conditions under
which the two sets of colonistK have lived.
It is due to the different antecedent
history of the two races. So a history of
America must be a history not only of
America, but of the Spaniards, Portuguese,
French, and Enghsh — one ought in strict-
ness to add of the negroes also — before
they crossed the Atlantic. The only
true Americans, the only Americans for
whom American nature can be deemed
answerable, are the aboriginal red men
whom we, perpetuating the mistake of
Columbus, still call Indians.
This objection to the geographical scheme
of history wTiting is no doubt
Geography ggj-ious when a historical
as a Basis
of History
treatise is confined to one par-
ticular country or continent,
as in the instance I have taken of the
Continent of North America. It is, how-
ever, less formidable in a universal his-
tory, such as the present work, because,
by referring to another volume of the
series, the reader will find what he needs
to know regarding the history of the
Spaniards, English, and French in those
respective European homes where they
have grown to be that which they were
when, with religion, slaughter, and slavery
in their train, they descended upon the
shores of America.
Accordingly the difficulty I have pointed
out does not disparage the idea and plan
of writing universal history on a geogra-
phical basis. It merely indicates a caution
needed in applying that plan, and a con-
dition indispensable to its utility— viz.,
the regard that must be had to the stage
of progress at which a people has arrived
when it is subjected to an environment
different from that which had in the first
instance helped to form its type.
THE GROWTH OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
WE have now considered some of the
ways in which a universal history,
written with special reference to the
physical phenomena of the earth as geo-
graphical science presents them, may bring
into strong relief one large and perma-
nent set of influences which determine
the progress or retrogression of each
several branch of mankind. Upon the
other principles which preside over and
direct the composition of such a work,
not much need be said. They are, of
course, in the main, those which all
competent historians will follow in
writing the history of any particular
people.
But a universal history which endea-
vours to present in a short compass a
record of the course of events in all
regions and among all peoples, since
none can safely be omitted, is specially
exposed to two dangers. One is that
of becoming sketchy and viewy. When
a large object has to be dealt with on
a small scale, it is natural to sum up in
a few broad generalisations masses of
facts which cannot be described or ex-
amined in detail. Broad generalisations
are valuable when they proceed from
a thoroughly trained mind — valuable,
even if not completely verifiable, because
they excite reflection. But it is seldom
possible to make them exact. They neces-
sarily omit most of the exceptions, and thus
suggest a greater uniformity than exists.
The other danger is that of sacrificing
brightness and charm of presentation.
When an effort is made to avoid generah-
sations, and to squeeze into the narrative
as many facts as the space will admit, the
35
INTRODUCTION BY RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
narrative is apt to become dry, because
compression involves the curtailment of
the personal and dramatic element. These
are the rocks between which every his-
torian has to steer. If he has ample space,
he does well to prefer the course of giving
all the salient facts and leaving the reader
to generalise for himself. If, however, his
space is limited, as must needs
^^'^^ . be the lot of those who write
of Care in ^ universal history, the impossi-
History ^j^-^^ ^^ ^^j^^g -^^^^ minute
detail makes generalisations inevitable,
for it is through them that the result
and significance of a multitude of minor
facts must be conveyed in a condensed
form.
All the greater, therefore, becomes the
need for care and sobriety in the forming
and setting forth every summarising
statement and general conclusion or judg-
ment. Probably the soundest guiding
principle and best safeguard against error
is to be found in shunning all precon-
ceived hypotheses which seek to explain
history by one set of causes, or to read it
in the light of one idea. The habit of
magnifying a single factor, such as the
social factor, or the economic, or the
religious, has been a fertile source of
weakness in historical writing, because
it has made the presentation of events
one-sided, destroying that balance
and proportion which it is the highest
merit of any historian to have attained.
Theory and generalisation are the life-
blood of history. They make it intelligible.
They give it unity. They convey to us
the instruction which it always contains,
together with so much of practical
guidance in the management of com-
munities as history is capable of rendering.
Hut they need to be applied with reserve,
and not only with an impartial mind, but
after a painstaking examination of all
the facts — whether or no they seem to
make for the particular theory
New Minds stated— and of all the theories
^^^ „ which any competent predc-
cessor has propounded.
For the historian, though he must keep
himself from falling under the dominion
of any one doctrine by which it is sought
to connect and explain phenomena, must
welcome all the light which any such
doctrine can throw upon facts. Even if
such a doctrine be imperfect, even if it
be tainted by error, it may serve to
indicate relations between facts, or to
indicate the true importance of facts,
which previous writers had failed to
observe, or had passed too lightly over.
It is thus that history always needs to
be re-written. History is a progressive
science, not merely because new facts
are constantly being discovered, not
merely because the changes in the world
give to old facts a new significance,
but also because every truly penetrating
and original mind sees in the old facts
something which had not been seen
before.
A universal history is fitted to correct
such defects as may be incident to that
extreme specialism in historical writing
which is now in fashion. The broad and
concise treatment which a history of all
times and peoples must adopt naturally
leads to efforts to characterise the dom-
inant features and tendency of an epoch
or a movement, whether social, economic,
or political.
Yet even here there is a danger to be
guarded against. No epoch, no move-
ment, is so simple as it looks at first sight,
or as one would gather from even the most
honest contemporary writer.
The Side jhere is always an eddy at
Streams the side of the stream ; and the
of History stream itself is the resultant
of a number of rivulets with different
sources, whose waters, if the metaphor
may be extended, are of different tints.
Let any man study minutely a given
epoch, such as that of the Reformation
in Germany, or that of the Revolutionary
War in America, and he will be surprised
to find how much more complex were
the forces at work than he had at first
supposed, and on how much smaller a
number of persons than he had fancied
the principal forces did in fact directly
operate. Or let any one — for this is
perhaps the best, if the most difficult,
method of getting at the roots of Ihis
complexity — study thoroughly and dis-
passionately the phenomena of his own
time. Let him observe how many move-
ments go on simultaneously, sometimes
accelerating, sometimes retarding, one
another, an 1 mark how, the more fully he
understands this complex interlacing, so
much the less confident do his predictions
of the future become. He will then
realise .how hard it is to find simple ex-
planations and to deliver exact state-
ments regarding critical epochs in the
past.
37
38
THE FIRST INDUSTRIES: POTTERY
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
THE FIRST INDUSTRIES: THE FORGE
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
39
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Nevertheless, the task of summarising
and explaining is one to which the writer
of a History of the World must address
himself. If he has the disadvantage of
limited space, he has the advantage of
being able to assume the reader's know-
ledge of what has gone before, and to
invite the reader's attention to what will
come after. Thus he stands in a better
position than does the writer who deals
with one country or one epoch only for
making each part of history illustrate
other parts, for showing how similar social
tendencies, similar proclivities of human
nature, work similarly under varying
conditions and are followed by similar,
though never identical, results. He is
able to bring out the essential unity of
history, expunging from the reader's
mind the conventional and often mis-
leading distinctions that are commonly
drawn between the ancient, the mediccval,
and the modern time. He can bring the
contemporaneous course of events in
different countries into a fruitful relation.
And in the case of the present work, which
dwells more especially on the geographical
r... .. . side of history, he can illustrate
The Main r u x •
_, from each country m succes-
of History
sion the influence of physical
environment on the formation
of races and the progress of nations, the
principles which determine the action of
such environment being everywhere simi-
lar, though the forms which that action
takes are infinitely various.
Is there, it may be asked, any central
thread in following which the unity of
history most plainly appears ? Is there
any process in tracing which we can feel
that we are floating down the main stream
of the world's onward movement ? If
there be such a process, its study ought
to help us to realise the unity of history
by connecting the development of the
numerous branches of the human family.
One such process has already been
adverted to and illustrated. It is the
giadual and constant increase in man's
power over Nature, whereby he is emanci-
pated more and more from the conditions
she imposes on his life, yet is brought
into an always closer touch with her by
the discovery of new methods of using
her gifts. Two other such jirocesses may
be briefly examined. One goes on in the
sjihere of time, and consists in the accu-
mulation from age to age of the strength,
the knowledge, and the culture of man-
40
kind as a whole. The other goes on in
space as well as in time, and may be
described as the contraction of the
world, relatively to man.
The accumulation of physical strength
is most apparent in the increase of the
human race. We have no trustworthy
data for determining the population, even
_, ♦ °^ ^^y ^^^ civilised country,
, ^ '^^ more than a century and a half
Increase of , , -^
„ , .. ago : much less can we con-
Population ° , ' .-u 4. { 4.
]ecture that of any country m
primitive or prehistoric times. It is clear,
however, that in prehistoric times — say,
six or seven thousand years ago, there
were very few men on the earth's surface.
The scarcity of food alone would be
sufficient to prove that ; and, indeed, all
our data go to show it. Fifty years ago
the world's population used to be roughly
conjectured at from seven to nine hundred
millions, two-thirds of them in China and
India. It is now estimated at over
fifteen hundred millions. That of
Europe alone must have tripled within a
century, and can hardly be less than
four hundred millions. That of North
America may have scarcely exceeded
four or five millions in the time
of Christopher Columbus, or at the date
of the first English settlements, though
we have only the scantiest data for a
guess. It may now be 130,000,000, for
there are over a hundred millions in the
United States alone, about fifteen in
Mexico, and eight in Canada, besides the
inhabitants of Central America.
The increase has been most swift in the
civilised countries, such as Britain, Ger-
many, Russia, and the United States ;
but it has gone on in India also since
India came under British rule (famines
notwithstanding), and in the regions
recently colonised by Europeans, such as
Australia, Siberia, and Argentina, the
disappearance of aborigines being far
more than compensated for by the prolific
p IT l^ower of the white immi-
c ro I ic prj-j^iitc;. Some regions, such as
, "^f*^-" , Asia Minor and i)arts of North
White People .[■ .11 11
Airica, are more thmly peopled
now than they were under the Roman
limpire, and both China and Peru may
have no larger jiopulalion than they had
five, or ten. or fifteen centuries ago. But
taking the world at large, the increase is
enormous, and will ajiparently continue.
Even after the vjjcant cultivable spaces
which remain in the two Americas,
INTRODUCTION BY RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
Physic&l &
Intellectual
Power
Northern Asia, and Australasia have been
filled, the discovery of new modes of
enlarging the annually available stock of
food may maintain the increase. It is
most conspicuous among the European
races, and is, of course, due to the greater
production in some regions of food, and
in others of commodities wherewith food
can be purchased. It means
an immense addition to the
physical force of mankind in
the aggregate, and to the
possibilities of intellectual force also — a
point to be considered later. And, of
course, it also means an immense and
growing preponderance of the civilised
white nations, which are now probably
one half of mankind, and may, in
another century, when they have risen
from about five hundred to, possibly, one
thousand or fifteen hundred millions, be
nearly two-thirds.
As respects the strength of the average
individual man, the inquiry is less simple.
Palaeolithic man and neolithic man were
apparently (though here and there may
have been exceptions) comparatively feeble
creatures, as are the relics of the most
backward tribes known to us, such as the
Veddas of Ceylon, the Bushmen, the
Fuegians. Some savages, as, for instance,
the Patagonians, are men of great stature,
and some of the North American Indians
possess amazing powers of endurance.
The Greeks of the fifth century B.C., and
the Teutons of the time of Julius Caesar,
had reached a high physical development.
Pheidippides is said to have traversed one
hundred and fifty miles on foot in forty-
eight hours. But if we think of single
feats of strength, feats have been per-
formed in our own day — such as Captain
Webb's swimming across the Straits of
Dover — equal to anything recorded from
ancient or mediaeval times. To swim
across the much narrower Hellespont was
then deemed a surprising exploit. Nor do
., , ., we know of any race more to
Modern Man , j j r t, • i
_^ ,. be commended lor physical
Stronger than , r ^^.l
... ^ power and vigour oi constitu-
his Ancestors ;. ,, ,i . i i
tion than the American back-
woodsmen of Kentucky or Oregon to-day.
The swords used by the knights of the
fifteenth century have usually handles
too small for many a modern English or
German hand to grasp.
Isolated feats do not prove very much,
but there is good reason to believe that
the average European is as strong as ever
he was, and probably more healthy, at
least if longevity is a test of health.
One may fairly conclude that with better
and more abundant food, the average of
stature and strength has improved over
the world at large, so that in this respect
also the force of mankind as a whole has
advanced. Whether this advance will
continue is more doubtful. In modern
industrial communities the law of the
survival of the fittest may turn out to be
reversed, for it is the poorer and lower
sections of the population that marry at
an early age, and have the largest
families, while prudential considerations
keep down the birth-rate among the
upper middle-class. In Transylvania, for
instance, the Saxons are dying out,
because very few children are born to each
pair, while the less educated and cultured
Rumans increase fast. In North America,
the Old New England stock of compara-
tively pure British blood has begun to be
swamped by the offspring of the recent
immigrants, mostly Irish or French
Canadians ; and although the sons of
New England, who have gone West,
continue to be prolific, it is
probable that the phenomena of
New England will recur in the
Mississippi Valley, and that
the newcomers from Europe who form the
less cultivated strata of the population —
Irish, Germans, Italians, Czechs, Poles,
Slovaks, Rumans — will contribute an in-
creasing proportion of the inhabitants.
Some of these, and especially the Irish
and the Germans and the Scandinavians,
are among the best elements in the
American population, and have produced
men of the highest distinction. But the
average level among them of versatile
aptitude and of intellectual culture is
slightly below that of the native Americans.
Now, the poorer sections are in most
countries, though of course not always to
the same extent, somewhat inferior in
physical as well as in mental quality,
and more prone to suffer from that
greatest hindrance to physical improve-
ment, the abuse of alcoholic drinks.
We come next to another form of the
increase of human resources, the accumu-
lation of knowledge, and of what may be
called intellectual culture and capacity,
for it is convenient to distinguish these
two latter from knowledge.
In knowledge there has been an
advance, not merely a tolerably steady
41
America's
Mingled
Races
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
and constant advciuce, but one which has
gone on with a sort of geometrical pro-
gression, moving the faster the nearer
we come to our own time. Whatever
may have befallen in the
prehistoric darkness, history
knows of only one notable arrest
or setback in the onward
march — that which marks the seventh,
eighth, and ninth centuries of the Christian
era. Even this set-back was practically
confined to Southern and Western Europe,
and affected only certain departments of
Inventions
Mean
Progress
PIONEERS OF' MODERN CIVILISATION
The discovery of precious metals is a great factor in progress. Seekers after
gold are chief among the pioneers who help to carry civilisation into new lands.
42
knowledge. It did not, save, perhaps, as
regards a few artistic processes, extinguish
that extremely important part of the
previously accumulated resources of man-
kind which consisted in the knowledge
of inventions. It is in respect of inven-
tions, especially mechanical and physical
or chemical inventions, that the accumu-
lation of knowledge has been most note-
worthy and most easy to appreciate.
A history of inventions is a history of
the progress of mankind, of a progress to
which every race may have contributed
in primitive times,
though all the later
contributions have
come from a few of
the most civilised.
Every great inven-
tion marks one on-
ward step, as one
may see by enume-
rating a few, such as
the use of fire, cook-
ing, metal working,
the domestication ot
wild animals, the
tillage of the ground,
the use of plough
and mattock and
harrow and fan, the
discovery of plants
or trees useful for
food or for medicine,
the cart, the wheel,
the water-mill (over-
shot, undershot, and
turbine), the wind-
mill, the distaff
(followed long, long
after by the spin-
ning - wheel), the
loom, dyestuffs, the
needle, the potter's
wheel, the hydraulic
press, the a x e -
handle, the spear,
the bow, the
shield, the war-
chariot, the sling,
the cross-bow, the
boat, the paddle,
the oar, the helm,
the sail, the
mariner's com-
pass, the clock,
picture - writing,
the alphabet, parch-
mcnt, paper.
^^!^Sri^J^^S,^^^^--^^^^
printing, photography, the shdmg keel,
the sounding-lead, the log, the brick,
mortar, the column, the arch, the donie,
till we come down to explosives, the
microscope, the cantilever, and the Ront-
gen rays. . ,.
The history of the successive discovery,
commixture, and applications of the
metals, from copper and bron/.e down
to manganese, platinum, and arammium,
or of the successive discovery and utiU^a-
tion of sources of power— the natural
sources, such as water and wind, the
artificially procured, such as steam, gas,
and electricity— or of the production and
manufacture of materials available tor
clothing, wool, hair, hnen, silk, cotton,
would show how every step becomes
the basis for another step, and how
inventions in one department suggest
or facihtate inventions m another.
Recent discoveries in surgery and medi-
cine, such as the use of antiseptics,
tend to improve health and to prolong
life; and in doing so, they increase
the chances of further discoveries being
made. , , ,
Who can tell what the world may have
lost by the early death of many a man
of genius ? One peculiar line of discovery
The
Prolonging
of Life
none has
which at first seemed to have nothing to
do with practice has proved to be of signa
service ; the working out of mathematical
methods of calculatio-n by means of which
the mechanical and physical sciences
have in recent times made a progress m
their practical apphcation undreamt ot
by those who laid the foundations of
geometry and algebra many
centuries ago. It may, indeed,
be said that all the sciences
need one another, and that
iiuiie lias been without its utihties for
practice, since even that which deals with
the heavenly bodies has been used for the
computation of time, was used by the
agriculturist before he had any calendars
to guide him, and has been of supreme
value to the navigator. It has also been
suggested that an observation of sun spots
may enable the advent of specially hot
seasons, involving droughts, to be pie-
dicted. , , ,
Another kind of knowledge also grows
by the joint efforts of many peoples,
that which records the condition of men
in the past and the present, including
history, economics, statistics, and the
other so-called social sciences. This kind
also is useful for practice, and has led to
43
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
improvements by which nearly all nations
have profited, such as an undebased
currency, banking and insurance, better
systems of taxation, corporations, and joint
stock compmnies. With this we may
couple the invention of improved political
institutions.
The accumulation of knowledge, espe-
ciaUy of scientific knowledge applied to
the exploitation of the resources of
Nature, means the accumulation of wealth
— that is to say, of all the things which
men need or use. The total wealth of
the world must have at least quadrupled
or quintupled within the last hundred
years. Nearly all of it is in the hands or
under the control of the civilised nations
of European stock, among whom the
United States stands foremost, both in
rate of economic growth and in the
absolute quantity of values possessed.
Two further observations belong to this
part of the subject. One is that this
stock of useful knowledge, the accumula-
tion of which is the central fact of the
material progress as well as of the in-
tellectual history of mankind, now belongs
to (practically) all races and
M.^r.^ ^* states alike. Some, as we
shall note presently, are more
able to use it than others, but
all have access to it. This is a new fact.
It is true that most races have contributed
something to the common stock ; and
that even among the civilised peoples,
no one or two or three (except possibly
the Greeks as respects ancient times)
can claim to have contributed much more
than the others. But in earlier ages
there were peoples or groups of peoples
who were for a time the sole possessors
of inventions which gave them great
advantages, especially for war. Superior
weapons as well as superior drill enabled
Alexander the Great, and afterward the
Romans, to conquer most of the civilised
world. Horses and firearms, with courage
and discipline, enabled two Spanish adven-
turers to seize two ancient American
empires with very scanty forces, as they
enabled a handful of Dutch Boers to over-
come the hosts of Mosilikat/x- and Dingaan.
So there were formerly industrial arts
known to or practised by a few peoples
only. But now all inventions, even those
relating to war, are available even to
the more backward races, if they can
learn how to use them or can hire white
men to do so for them. The facilities of
44
Means
Wealth
communication are so great, the mean?
of publicity so abundant, that every-
thing becomes speedily known every-
where.
The other observation is that there is
now no risk that any valuable piece of
knowledge will be lost. Every public
event that happens, as well as every
fact of scientific consequence,
is put on record, and that not
arc now ^ ■ , , j-
,, . , on a smgle stone or in a few
Universal 9 . i , • i i r
manuscripts, but in books, of
which so many copies exist that even
the perishable nature of the material
will not involve the loss of the contents,
since, if these contents are valuable,
they will be transferred to and issued
in other books, and so ad infinitum.
Thus every process of manufacture is
known to so many persons that while it
continues to be serviceable it is sure to be
familiar and transmitted from generation
to generation by practice as well as by
description. We must imagine a world
totally different from the world we know
in order to imagine the possibility of any
diminution, indeed of any discontinuance
of the increase, of this stock of knowledge
which the world has been acquiring, and
which is not only knowledge but potential
wealth.
When one passes from knowledge
considered as a body of facts ascertained
and available for use to the thing we call
intellectual aptitude or culture — namely,
the power of turning knowledge to account
and of producing results in spheres other
than material — and when we inquire
whether mankind has made a parallel
advance in this direction, it becomes
necessary to distinguish three different
kinds of intellectual capacity.
The first may be called the power of
using scientific methods for investigating
phenomena, whether jihysical or social.
The second is the jiower of speculation,
applied to matters which have not hitherto
been found capable of ex-
No Decrease a^in^^tion by the methods of
of Knowledge
is now Likely
science, whether observa-
tional, experimental, or mathe-
matical. The third is the power of
intellectual creation, whether literary or
artistic.
The methods of scientific inquiry may
almost be classed with the ascertained
facts of science or with inventions, as
being parts of the stock of accumulated
knowledge built up by the labour of
INTRODUCTION BY RT. KON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
.many generations. They are known to
ev^erybody who cares to study them, and
can be learnt and appHed by everybody
who will give due diligence. Just as
every man can be taught to fire a gun,
or steer a ship, or write a letter, though
guns, helms, and letters are the result
of discoveries made by exceptionally
gifted men, so every graduate in science
of a university can use the methods of
induction, can observe and experiment
with a correctness which a few centuries
ago even the most vigorous minds could
scarcely have reached.
Because the methods have been so fully
explained and illustrated as to have grown
familiar, a vast host of investigators,
very few of whom possess scientific
genius, are at work to-day extending our
scientific knowledge. So the methods of
historical criticism — so the methods of
using statistics — are to-day profitably
applied by many men with no such
original gift as would have made them
competent critics or statisticians had not
the paths been cut by a few great men
and trodden since by hundreds of feet.
_ . , All that is needed is imita-
rigina ^-^^ — intelligent and careful
Thinkers arc ■ •. ,• ^t xi. i ^i
..„ „ imitation. Nevertheless, there
still Rare ,i • i . ,
remains this sharp contrast
between knowledge of the facts of
applied science and knowledge of the
methods, that whereas there is no radical
difference between the ability of one man
and that of another to use a mechanical
invention, such as a steam plough or an
electric motor-car, there is all the difference
in the world between the power of one
intellect and another to use a method for
the purposes of fresh discovery. Know-
ledge fossilised in a concrete invention
or even in a mathematical formula is a
sort of tool ready to every hand. But
a method, though serviceable to every-
body, becomes eminently fruitful only
when wielded by the same kind of original
genius as that which made discoveries by
the less perfect methods of older days.
This is apparent even in inquiries
which seem to reside chiefly in collection
and computation. Everybody tries now-
adays to use statistics. Many people do
use them profitably. But the people who
by means of statistics can throw really
fresh and brilliant light on a problem are
as few as ever they were.
When we turn to the exercise of specu-
lative thought on subjects not amenable to
strictly scientific — that is to say, to exact —
methods, the gain which has come to
mankind by the labour of past ages is of
a different order. Metaphysics, ethics,
and theology, to take the most obvious
examples, are all of them the richer for
the thoughts of ]:)hilosophers in the past.
A number of distinctions have been drawn,
. . , and a number of classifications
Advantage of j u £ x- ■
.. , made, a number of contusions,
Modern over r^^ i i i i i j
/M J Tt • 1 often verbal, have been cleared
Old Thinkers , r c ^^ ■
up, a number of fallacies
detected, a number of technical terms
invented, whereby the modern speculator
enjoys a great advantage over his prede-
cessor. His mind has been clarified, and
many new aspects of the old problems
have been presented, so that he is better
able to see all round the old problems.
None of the great thinkers, from Pytha-
goras down to Hegel, has left metaphysics
where he found it. Yet none can be said
to have built on the foundations of his
predecessors in the same way as the
mathematicians and physicists and chemists
have added to the edifice they found.
What the philosophers have done is to
accumulate materials for the study of
man's faculties and modes of thinking, and
of his ideas regarding his relations to
the universe, while also indicating various
methods by which the study may be pur-
sued. Each great product of speculative
thought is itself a part of these materials,
and for that reason never becomes obso-
lete, as the treatises of the old physicists
and chemists have mostly become. Aris-
totle, for instance, has left us books on
natural history, on metaphysics and
ethics, and on politics. Those on natural
history are mere curiosities, and no modern
biologist or zoologist needs them. Those
on metaphysics and ethics still deserve
the attention of the student of philosophy,
though he may in a certain sense be said
to have got beyond them. The treatise
on politics still keeps its place beside
... Montesquieu, Burke, and Toc-
Th^ ht"^^ queville. Or, to take a thinker
a Dead Age
who seems further removed
from us even than Aristotle,
though fifteen hundred years later m date,
St. Thomas of Aquinum discusses ques-
tions from most of which the modern
world has moved away, and discusses
them by methods which few would now
use, starting from premises which few
would now accept. But he marks a
remarkable stage in the history of human
45
HIL c
OF THE WORLD
thought, and as a part of that history, and
as an example of extraordinary dialectical
ingenuity and subtlety, he remains an
object of interest to those least in agree-
ment with his conclusions.
Every great thinker affects other
thinkers, and propagates the impulse he
has received, though perhaps in a quite
different direction. The
Th^T '^^ teaching of Socrates was
A rr " /'^/N.i. the starting point for nearly
Affects Others ,, ^, i_ . i i r
all the subsequent schools of
Greek philosophy. Hume became the point
of departure for Kant, who desired to lay a
deeper foundation for philosophy than that
which Hume seemed to have overturned.
All these great ones have not only enriched
us, but are still capable of stimulating
us. But they have not improved our
capacity for original thinking. The
accumulation of scientific knowledge has,
as already observed, put all mankind
in a better position for solving further
physical problems and establishing a
more complete dominion over Nature.
The accumulation of philosophic thought
has had no similar effect. In the former
case each man stands, so to speak, on
the shoulders of his predecessors. In the
latter he stands on his own feet. The value
of future contributions to philosophy will
depend on the original power of the minds
that make them, and only to a small extent
(except by way of stimulus) on what such
minds may have drawn from those into
whose labours they have entered.
When we come to the products of
literary and artistic capacity, we find an
even vaster accumulation of intellectual
treasure available for enjoyment, but a
still more marked absence of connection
between the amount of treasures possessed
and the power of adding fresh treasures
to them. Since writing came into use, and,
indeed, even in the days when memory
alone preserved lays and tales, every age
anfl many races have contributed to the
_ _,. stock. There have been ebbs
r I . 'ii^ . 1 ''ind flows both in quantity
of Intellectual , ,-, i-i ' . ■
r- u and quality. Ihc centuries
Culture 1 "^ /- 1
between a.d. ooo and a.d.
iioo have left us very little of high merit
in literature, though something in archi-
tecture ; and the l^cst of that little in
literature did not come from the seats of
ivoman civilisation in Italy, France,
Spain, and the East Roman Empire.
Some periods have seen an eclipse of
poetry, others an eclipse of art or a
46
sterility in music. Literature and the arts
have not always flourished together, and
musical genius in particular seems to have
little to do with the contemporaneous
development of other forms of intellectual
power. The quantity of production bears
no relation to the quality, not even an
inverse relation ; for the pessimistic
notion that the larger the output the
smaller is the part which possesses brilliant
excellence, has not been proved. Still less
does the amount of good work produced
in any given area depend upon the number
of persons living in that area. Florence,
between a.d. 1250 and a.d. 1500 gave
birth to more men of first-rate poetical
and artistic genius than London has pro-
duced since 1250 ; yet Florence had in
THE MIND OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
Aristotle (B.C. 384-322) whose influence is greater in
modern thought than that of St. Thomas of Aquinuin^
who represents mediaeval thought, 1500 years later.
those two and a half centuries a population
of probably only from forty to sixty
thousand. And Florence her.self has since
A.D. 1500 given birth to .scarcely any
distinguished poets or artists, though her
j:)opulati()n has been larger than it was in
the fifteenth century.
The increa.se in the world's stock of
intellectual wealth is one of the most
remarkable facts in history, for it rej)resents
a constant increa.se in the means of en-
joyment. Such lo.s.ses as there have
been nearly all occurred during the
Dark Ages ; l)ut there is now little risk
INTKODUCTION BY RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
that anything of high htcrary or musical
value will perish, though^ of course, works
of art, and especially buildings and carv-
ings, suffer or vanish.
The increase does not, however, tend
to any strengthening of the creative
faculty. There is a greater abundance of
rtiodels of excellence, models of which form
the taste, afford a stimulus to sensitive
minds, and establish a sort of technique
with well-known rules. The principles of
criticism are more fully investigated.
The power of analysis grows, and the
appreciation both of literature and of art
is more widely diffused. Their influence
on the whole community becomes greater,
but the creative imagination which is
needed for the production of original work
THE MIND OF THE MEDIEVAL WORLD
St. Thomas of Aquinnm, 1500 years later than Aristotle,
represents mediaeval thought. But the Mediaeval World
is more remote than the Classical in thought and science.
becomes no more abundant and no more
powerful. It may, indeed, be urged, though
our data are probably insufficient for a
final judgment, that the finer qualities of
poetry and of pictorial and plastic art tend
rather to decline under the more analytic
habit of mind which belongs to the modern
world. Simplicity, freshness, spontaneity
come less naturally to those who have fallen
under the pervasive influence of this habit.
There remains one other way in which
the incessant play of thought may be
said to have increased or improved the
resources of mankind. Certain principles
or ideas belonging to the moral and social
sphere — to the moral sphere by their
origin, to the social sphere by their results
— make their way to a more or less general
acceptance, and exert a potent influence
upon human life and action. They are
absent in the earliest communities of
which we know, or are present only in
Effect of ^^^^' ^^^^ emerge, some-
^. . , times in the form of customs
Thought on J 11 1 1.
w • • J gradually built up m one or
Mankind ° -^ , ^ .■ - .1
more peoples, sometimes in the
utterances of one gifted mind. Sometimes
they spread impalpably ; sometimes they
become matter for controversy, and are
made the battle-cries of parties. Some-
times they end by being universally re-
ceived, though not necessarily put into
practice. Sometimes, on the other hand,
they continue to be rejected in one country,
or by one set of persons in a country, as
vehemently as they are asserted by another.
As instances of these principles or ideas or
doctrines, whatever one is to call them,
the following may be taken : The con-
demnation of piracy, of slavery, and of
treaty-breaking, of outrages on the bodies
of dead enemies, of cruelty to the lower
animals, of the slaughter of prisoners in
cold blood, of polygamy, of torture to
witnesses or criminals ; the recognition
of the duty of citizens to obey the laws,
and of the moral responsibility of rulers
for the exercise of their power, of the right
of each man to hold his own religious
opinion and to worship accordingly, of
the civil (though not necessarily of the
pohtical) equality of all citizens ; the dis-
approval of intoxication, the value set
upon female chastity, the acceptance of
the social and civil (to which some would
add the political) equality of women.
All these dogmas or ideas or opinions —
some have become dogmas in all civilised
peoples, others are rather to be described as
opinions whose truth or worth is denied
or only partially admitted — are the slow
product of many generations. Most of
-. them are due to what we may
r^^^,^.. ^ . call the intelligence and senti-
Contnbuted , . 1 ■ j ,1
p ment of mankind at large,
rather than to their advocacy
by any prominent individual thinkers. The
teachings of such thinkers have, of course,
done much to advance them. Everybody
would name Socrates and Confucius as
among the men who have contributed to
their progress ; some would add such
names as those of Mohammed and
47
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
St. Francis of Assisi. Christianity has, of
course, made the largest contributions.
How much is due to moral feeling, how
much to a sense of common utility, cannot
be exactly estimated. Economic reason-
ings and practical experience would have
probably in the long run destroyed
_ slavery, but it was sentiment
rx ^ ^^ ^ that did in fact destroy it in
Destroyed , . .,- j Ci i. u
by Sentiment
the civilised States where it
had longest survived.
How much these doctrines, even in the
partial and imperfect application which
most of them have secured, have done
for humanity may be perceived by any-
one who will imagine what the world
would be if they were unknown. They
form one of the most substantial additions
made to what may be called the intel-
lectual and moral capital with which man
has to work this planet and improve his
own life upon it. And the most interesting
and significant crises in history are those
which have turned upon the recognition
or application of principles of this kind.
The Reformation of the sixteenth century,
the French Revolution, the War of Seces-
sion in the United States, are familiar
modern examples.
Putting all these forms of human
achievement together — the extension of
the scientific knowledge of Nature with
consequent mastery over her, the scientific
knowledge of social phenomena in the
past and the present, the records of philo-
sophic speculation, the mass of literary
and artistic products, the establishment,
however partial and imperfect, of regu-
lative moral and political principles —
it will be seen that the accumulation of this
vast stock of intellectual wealth has been
an even more imj)ortant factor than the
increase of population in givmg man
strength and dignity over against Nature,
and in opening up to him an endless variety
of modes of enjoying life — that is to say, of
making it yield to him the most which its
shortness and his own jihysical infirmities
. . jiermit. The process by which
\j- I..- .1. this accumulation has been
Mighlierthan • i i • xu ^ ^
~ , ,. carried along is the central
/Population , , f , . «,,
thread of history. The main
aim of a history of the world must be
to show what and how each race or
people has contributed to the general
stock. To this aim political history,
ecclesiastical history, economic history,
the history of philosophy, and the history
of science, are each of them subordinate,
48
though it is only through them that
the process can be explained.
In these last few pages intellectual
progress has been considered apart from
the area in which it has gone on, and apart
from the conditions imposed on it by the
natural features of that area. A few words
are, however, needed regarding its relation
to the surface of the earth. The move-
ment of civilisation must be considered
from the side of space as well as from that
of time.
Space is a material element in the
inquiry because it has divided the families
of mankind from one another. Some fami-
lies, such as the Chinese and the Peru-
vians, have developed independently, some,
such as the South and West European
peoples, in connection with, or perhaps in
dependence on, the development of other
races or peoples. Hence that which each
achieved was in some cases achieved for
itself only, in other cases for its neighbours
as well. The contributions made by dif-
ferent races have — at any rate during the
last four thousand years, and probably in
earlier days also — been very unequal ; yet
none can have failed to con-
n rac ion ^j-j|~,y|-g something if only by
th W Id ^^^y °^ influencing the others.
Inequality in progress would
seem to have become more marked in the
later than in the earlier periods. Indeed,
some races, such as those of Australia,
appear during many centuries, possibly
owing to their isolation, to have made
no i)rogress at all. They may even have
receded.
When we regard the evolution and
develo{)ment of man from the side of his
relations to space, three facts stand out —
the contraction of the world, the overflow
of the more advanced races, and the conse-
quent diffusion all over the world of what
is called civilisation.
By the contraction of the world, I mean
the greater swiftness, ease, and safety with
which men can pass from one part taf it to
another, or communicate with one another
across great intervening spaces. This has
the effect of making the world smaller for
most practical purposes, while the absolute
distance in latitude and longitude remains
the same. The progress of discovery is
worth tracing, for it shows how much
larger the small earth, which was known
to the early nations, must have seemed to
them than the whole earth, which we know,
seems to us.
THE ARTISTIC GENIUS OF TWO CITIES
A COMPARISON OF THE NATIVE POETS & ARTISTS OF FLORENCE & LONDON
"The quantity ol production," says Mr. Bryce, "bears no relation to the quality.
Still less does the amount ol good work produced in any given area depend
upon the number of persons living in that area. Florence between A.D. 1230 and
A.D. 1300 gave birth to more men of first-rate poetical and artistic genius than
London has produced since 1230; yet Florence had in those two and a half
centuries a population of probably only from forty to sixty thousand. And Florence
herself has since A.D. 1500 given birth to scarcely any distinguished poets or
artists, though her population has been larger than it was in the lifteenth century."
THE GENIUS OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF FLORENCE, 1250 TO 1300.
FAR EXCEEDED THAT OF LONDON FROM 1250 TO THE PRESENT DAY
Poets and Artists Born in
Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404-1472, architect, painter
Albertinelli, Mariotto, 1474-1515, painter I
Andrea del Sarto, 1487-1531, painter
Angelico da Fiesole, Fra Giovanni, 1387-1455, painter
Botticelli, Alessandro, 1447-1510, painter
Cavalcanti, Gnido, 1255-1^00, poet, philosopher j
Cimabue, Giovanni, 12401302, painter
Credi, Lorenzo di, 1439-1537, painter
Dante, Alighieri, 1265 1321, poet
Jlonatello, 1386-1466, sculptor and painter
Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 1378-1455, sculptor
Ghirlandajo, Domenico, 1449-1494, painter
Gozzoli, Benozzo, 1420-1498, painter
Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, painter, sculptor
Lippi, Fra Filippo, 1412-1469, painter
Lippi, Filippino, 1459-1504, painter
Lorenzo, Don, 1370-1425, painter
Florence from 1250-1500
Medici, Lorenzo de, 1448-1492, poet
Orcagnia, Andrea di Clone, 1329-1368? sculptor,
painter
Perugino, Vannucci Pietro, 1446-1524, painter
Pesellino, Francesco di, 1422-1457, painter
Pesello, Giuliano, 1367-1446, painter, sculptor
Pollajuolo, Antonio, 1429-1498, sculptor, painter
Pollajuolo, Piero, 1443-1496, sculptor, painter
Robbia, Andrea della, 1437-1528, sculptor
Robbia, Luca della, 1399-1482, sculptor
Rossi, Giovanni Battista de, 1494-1541, sculptor,
painter
Ruccellai, Giovanni, 1475-1525, poet
Spinello, Aretino, 1334-1410, painter
Ucello, Paolo, 1397-1475, painter
Verocchio, Andrea, 1435-1488, sculptor, painter
THE LAST FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF FLORENTINE CULTURE HAVE BEEN
LESS PRODUCTIVE THAN THE PRECEDING TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES
Poets and Artists Born in Florence since 1500
Allori, Christofano, 1577-1621, painter
Bronzino, Angelo, 1502-1572, painter
Cellini, Benvenuto, 1500-1571, sculptor
Cigoli, Luigi Cardi da, 1559-1613, painter
Cortona, Pietro da, 1596-1669, architect, painter
Dolci, Carlo, 1616-1686, painter
Doni, Antonio Francesco, 1513-1574, author
t'urini, Francesco, 1604-1646, painter
Ligozzi, Jacobino, 1543-1627, painter
Poccetti, Bernardino, 1542-1612, painter
Salviati, Francesco, 1510-1563, painter
San Giovanni, Giovanni da, 1599-1636, painter
Santi di Tito, 1538-1603, painter
Tacco, Pietro, 1580-1640, sculptor
Venusti, Marcello, 1515-1579, painter
The Only Great Poet Born in London from 1250-1500
Chaucer, Geoffrey,
Poets and Artists Born in
Blake, William, 1757-1827, poet and painter
Browning, Robert, 1812-1889, po^t
Byron, Geo. Gordon Noel, Lord, 1788-1824, poet
Defoe, Daniel, 1659-1731, author
Ford, Edward Onslow, 1852-1901, sculptor
Gilbert, Alfred, R.A., 1854 . sculptor
Gray, Thomas, 1716-1771, poet
Hogarth, William, 1697-1764, painter
Hood, Thomas, 1799-1845, poet
Hunt, William Holman, 1827-1910, painter
Jonson, Ben, 1573-1637, poet and dramatist
Keats, John, 1795-1821, poet
Lamb, Charles, 1775-1834, essayist
132B-1400
London since ISOO
Linnetl, John, 1792-18S2, painter
Lucas, John Seymour, 1849- • — , painter
Milton, John, 1608-1674, poet
Morland, George, 1763-1804, painter
Pope, Alexander, 168S-1744, poet
Richmond, Sir William Blake, 1843- — , painter
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828-1882, poet, painter
Ruskin, John, 1819-1900, author and art critic
Spenser, Edmund, 1552-1599, poet
Stothard, Thomas, 1755-1834, painter, illustrator
Swinburne, Algernon, 1837-1909, poet
Walker, Frederick, 1840-1875, painter
Watts, George F., 1817-1904, painter, sculptor
.f^r^
aa
49
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
The most ancient recoi ve possess
from Assyria, Egypt, Palesui. id from
the Homeric poems, show how . ^y hmited
was the range of geographical knowledge
possessed by that small ci . sed world
T,. c „ from which our o^yn civilisa-
The Small . i j i i •
World of "* "^ descende 'eakmg
the Ancients roughly, that knowledge seems
m the tenth century B.C. to
have extended about one thousand miles
in each direction from the Isthmus of Suez.
However, the best point of departure
for the peoples of antiquity is the era
of Herodotus, who travelled and wrote
B.C. 460-440. The
limits of the world
as he knew it were
Cadiz and the Straits
of Gibraltar on the
west, the Danube and
the Caspian on the
north, the deserts of
Eastern Persia on the
east, and the Sahara
on the south, with
vague tales regarding
peoples who lived
beyond, such as In-
dians far beyond
Persia, and pygmies
beyond the Sahara.
He reports, however,
not without hesita-
tion, a circumnavi-
gation of Africa by
Phoenicians in the
service of Pharaoh
Necho.
Discovery ad-
vanced very slowly
for many centuries,
though the march
of Alexander opened "^"^ first known map of the world
iin nirf r,f iht^ Fact This Babylonian map is probably of the eighth century B.C.
"I F"l •■ "Jl LUe iZ^abi;, The two circles are supposed to represent the ocean, while
while the Roman con- *''^ River Euphrates and Babylon are shown inside them.
, , 1 ^ J 1 The upper part of the tablet is a cuneiform inscription.
quests brought the ^
Far North-West, including Britain, within
Ihe range of civihsation ; and occasional
voyages, such as that of Hanno along the
coast of West Africa, that of Nearchus
through the Arabian Sea, and that of
Pythias to the Baltic, added something to
knowledge. Procopius in a.d. 540 can tell
us little more regarding the regions beyond
Roman influence than Strabo does five
and a half centuries earlier. The journeys
of Marco Polo and Rubruquis throw only
a passing light on the Far East. It is with
the Spanish occupation of the Canary
50
Isles, beginning in 1602, and with the
Portuguese voyages of the fifteenth century,
that the era of modern discovery opens.
The re-discovery of America in 1492, for it
had been already visited by the Northmen
of Greenland and Iceland in the eleventh
century, and the opening of the Cape route
to India in 1497-1498, were hardly equal
to the exploit of Magellan, whose circum-
navigation of the globe in 1519-1520 marks
the close of this striking period. There-
after discovery proceeds more slowly.
Some of the i.sles of the central and south-
ern Pacific were not visited till the middle
of the eighteenth
century, and the
north-west coast of
America as well as
the north-east Coast
of Asia, remained
little known till an
even later date.
Those explorations
of the interior of
North America, of
the interior of Africa,
of the interior of
Australia, and of
East Central Asia,
which have com-
pleted our know-
ledge of the earth,
belong to the nine-
teenth century. The
first crossing of the
North American Con-
tinent north of lati-
tude 40° was not
effected till a.d. 1806.
The desire for new
territory, for the pro-
pagation of religion,
and, above all, for
the precious metals,
were the chief
motives which
prompted the voyages of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. These motives
have remained operative ; and to them
has been added in more recent times
the spirit of pure adventure and the
interest in science, together
with, in increasing mesisure,
the effort to secure trade. But
the extension of trade followed
slowly in the wake of discovery. China and
Japan remained almost closed. The policy
of Spain sought to restrict her American
waters to her own ships, and the commerce
The Thirst
for New
Territories
The Hereford Map : about 1307
Note Paradise at tlie top, and Jerusalem in the centre
The Fra Mauro Map : about 1457
Babylon is shown in the centre of the map
The World as Known on the Eve of the Discovery of America (Drawn by Martin Behaim in 1492)
The World as known in 150 A. D. From a map by Ptolemy, who appears to have had knowledgre o. the sources of the Nile
THE FIRST MAPS: SOME EARLY GEOGRAPHERS' IDEAS OF THE WORLD
51
INTRODUCTION BY RT, HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
they carried was scanty. Communica-
tion remained slow and dangerous across
the oceans till the introduction of steam
vessels (1825-1830).
Land transport, though it had steadily
increased in Europe, remained costly as
well as slow till the era of railway con-
struction began in 1829. The application
of steam as a motive power and of elec-
tricity as a means of communicating
thought has been by far the greatest factor
in this long process of reducing the dimen-
sions of the world, which dates back as far
as the domestication of beasts of burden,
and the invention, first of paddles and oars,
and then of sails. The North American
Continent can now be crossed in five
days, the South American (from Valparaiso
to Buenos Ayres) ii under two, the
Transandine tunnel having now been
pierced. The Continent which stretches
from the Baltic to the North Pacific can
now be traversed in twelve days. By
means of the Trans-Siberian line and its
steamship connection with the ports of
Japan, it is now possible to go round the
globe in less than fifty days. Indeed, the
„ . ^ iourney has recentlv been done
Round the • r 1 1 Vt • j-i- •
... , , . ni forty days. Nor is this
World m .J.J.
40 Days !
acceleration of transit more
remarkable than its practi-
cal immunity, as compared with earher
times, not only from the dangers for which
Nature is answerable, but from those also
which man formerly interposed.
The increase of trade which has followed
in the track first of discovery and latterly
(with immensely larger volume) of the
improvement of means of transport, has
been accompanied not only by the seizure
of transoceanic territories by the greater
civiUsed States, but also by an outflow of
population from those States into the
more backward or more thinly-peopled
parts of the earth. Sometimes, as in the
case of North America, Siberia, and Aus-
traUa, the emigrants extinguish or absorb
the aboriginal population.
Sometimes, as in the case of India,
Africa, and some parts of South America,
they neither extinguish nor blend with the
previous inhabitants, but rule them and
spread what is called civilisation among
them — this civilisation consisting chiefly
in a knowledge of the mechanical arts
and of deathful weapons accompanied by
the destruction, more or less gradual,
of their pre-existing beliefs and usages.
Sometimes, again, as in the case of
China, and to some extent also of the
Mussulman East, though political dominion
is not established, the process of sub-
stituting a new civilisation for the old
one goes on despite the occasional efforts of
the backward people to resist the process.
The broad result is everywhere similar.
The modern European type of civilisation
„ is being diffused over the whole
European- .u i-
. . - earth, superseding, or essen-
the World *^^^^y modifying, the older local
types. Thus, in a still more
important sense than even that of com-
munications, the world is contracted and
becomes far more one than it has ever
been before. The European who speaks
three or four languages can travel over
nearly all of it, and he can find on most of
its habitable coasts, and in many parts of
the lately-discovered interior, the appli-
ances which are to him necessaries of life.
The world is, in fact, becoming an enlarged
Europe, so far as the externals of life and
the material side of civilisation are con-
cerned. The dissociative forces of Nature
have been overcome.
Putting together the two processes, the
process in time and the process in space,
which we have been reviewing, it will be
seen that the main line of the develop-
ment of mankind may be described as the
transmission and the expansion of cul-
ture— that is to say, of knowledge and
intellectual capacity. The stock of know-
ledge available for use and enjoyment has
been steadily increased, and what each
people accumulated has been made avail-
able for all. With this there has come
assimilation, the destruction of weaker
types of civihsation, the modification by
constant interaction of the stronger types,
the creation of a common type tending to
absorb all the rest. Assimilation has been
most complete in the sphere ruled by natu-
ral science — that is to say, in the material
sphere, less complete in that ruled by the
human sciences (including the sphere of
^ . political and social institu-
/i,™ . tions), still less complete in the
«i^;»„^» sphere of religious, moral, and
social ideas, and as respects the
products of literature and art. Or, in other
words, where certainty of knowledge is
attainable and utihty in practice is incon-
testable, the process of assimilation has
moved fastest and furthest.
The process has been a long one, for its
beginnings reach back beyond our his-
torical knowledge. So far as it lies within
53
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
;ng
her second great
first was in pro-
n the most an-
tu the sixth and
ristian era.
"h itself had
' , :.. well as from
Ue peoples of
the range of history, it falls into two periods,
the earlier of which supplies an instruc-
tive illustration of the later one which we
know better. The effort which Nature —
that is to say, the natural tendencies of
man as a social be. 'as been making
towards the unification of
.1^* ^i*^^-. , mankind d'"-;ng the last few
the Unity of , ■
^ ... centuries, is
Mankind „ , .L,
effort. The
gress from the time v\
cient records begin dc
seventh centuries of tl;
Greek civilisation,
drawn much from Eg •
Assyria, Phoenicia, an
Asia Minor, per-
meated the minus
and institutions (ex-
cept the legal in-
stitutions), of the
Mediterranean and
West European
countries, and was
propagated by the
governing energy of
the Romans. In its
Romanised form it
transformed or ab-
sorbed and super-
seded the less ad-
vanced civilisations
of all those countries,
creating one new
type for the whole
Roman world. With
some local diversities,
that type prevailed
from the Northum-
brian Wall of
Hadrian to the Cau-
independent States which were springing
up. The authority of Papal Rome helped to
carry this sense of unity among civilised
men through a period of ignorance, con-
fusion, and semi-barbarism which might
otherwise have extinguished it. Neverthe-
less, we may say, broadly speaking, that
the first effort towards the establishment
of a common type of civilisation was, if not
closed, yet arrested by the dissolution of
the Roman Empire in the West. Close
thereupon came the rise of Islam, tearing
away the Eastern provinces, and creating
a riv^al type of civilisation — though a type
largely influenced by the Greco-Roman —
which held its ground for some centuries,
and has only recently
shown that it is
destined to vanish.
The beginnings of
the second effort
toward the unifica-
tion of civilised man-
kind may be observed
as far back as the
eleventh and twelfth
centuries. Its effec-
tive and decisive
action may, however,
be assigned to the
fifteenth, when the
spread of literary and
philosophic culture,
and the swift exten-
sion of maritime
discovery, ushered in
the modern phase
wherein we have
marked its irresistible
advance. This phase
differs from the earlier
casus and the deserts the first traveller round the globe one both in its range
of Arabia The still ^^^ great exploit of Ferdinand Magellan, who circum- f„_ :^ prnhrarpc tViP
Ol /\iauicl. iUL SllU navigated the globe m 1519-1520, ranks among the events lOr It CmOraceS ine
independent races on of world importance, and was the culminating achievement wholc earth and nOt
the northern frontier °f the greatest period of discovery in the worlds history. ^^^^^^ ^^^ Mcditcr-
of the Empire received a tincture of it,
and would doubtless have been more
deeply imbued had the Roman Empire
stood longer.
Christianity, becoming dominant at a
time when the Empire was already totter-
ing, gave a new sense of unity to all whom
the Greco-Roman type had formed, ex-
tended the influence of that type still
further, and enabled much that belonged
to it (especially its religious, its legal, and
its literary elements) to survive the
political dominion of the Emperors and
to perpetuate itself among practically
54
ranean lands — and in its basis, for it rests
not so much upon conquest and religion
as upon scientific knowledge, formative
ideas, and commerce. Yet even here a
parallelism may be noted between the
ancient and the modern phase.
Knowledge and ideas had
brought about a marked
assimilation of various parts
of the ancient world to each other be-
fore Roman conquest completed the
work, and what conquest did was done
chiefly among the ruder races. So now,
while it is knowledge and ideas that have
Conquest
and
Civilisation
INTRODUCTION BY RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
worked for the creation of a common type
among the peoples of European stock,
conquest has been a potent means of
spreading this type in the outlying coun-
tries and among the more backward
races whose territories the European
nations have seized.
The diffusion of a f^w forms of speech
has played a great part in both
*ii^"f*^^ phases. Greek was spoken over
a ni ymg ^j^^ eastern half of the Roman
Influence u • .i_ j
world m the second century
A.D., though not to the extinction of such
tongues as Syriac and Egyptian. Latin
was similarly sp~>oken over the western half,
though not to the extinction of the tongues
we now call Basque and Breton and Welsh ;
and Latin continued to be the language of
European languages which retain a world
importance. English, German, and Spanish
are pre-eminently the three leading com-
mercial languages. They gain ground on
the rest, and it is EngUsh that gains ground
most swiftly. The German merchant is no
doubt even more ubiquitous (if the expres-
sion be permitted) than is the Enghsh ;
but the German more frequently speaks
English than the Englishman or American
speaks German.
It has already been observed that
assimilation has advanced least in the
sphere of institutions, ideas, and Uterature.
The question might, indeed, be raised
whether the types of thought, of national
character, and of literary activity repre-
sented by the five or six leading nations are
THE EUROPEANISATION OF THE WORLD
European civilisation is being diffused all over the earth, superseding or essentially modifying the older
local types. The solid black portions of this map represent territory under Anglo-Saxon control ; the
shaded parts are under other European control, and the dotted parts under Asiatic and African control.
religion, of law, of philosophy, and of
serious prose literature in general till the
sixteenth century. So now, several of the
leading European tongues are spoken far
beyond the limits of their birthplace, and
their wide range has become a powerful
influence in diffusing European culture.
German, Enghsh, Russian, Spanish, and
French are available for the purposes of
commerce, and for those who read books
over nineteen-twentieths of the earth's
surface. The languages of the smaller
non-European peoples are disappearing in
those places where they have to compete
with these greater European tongues,
except in so far as they are a medium of
domestic intercourse. Arabic, Chinese, and
in less degree Persian are the only non-
not rather tending to become more accen-
tuated. The self-consciousness of each
nation, taking the form of pride or vanity,
leads it to exalt its own type and to dwell
with satisfaction on whatever differenti-
ates it from other types. Nevertheless there
are influences at work in the domain of
practice as well as of thought, which, in
, . . . creating a common body of
4i,"'vw- opinion and a sense of com-
the Nations ' • ^ , , ,
Toecther ^^^ interest among large classes
belonging to these leading na-
tions, tend to link the nations themselves
together. Religious sympathy, or a com-
mon attachment to certain doctrines, such
as, for instance, those of Collectivism, works
in this direction among the masses, as the
love of science or of art does among
55
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
sections of the more educated class. As
regards the peoples not of European
stock, who are, broadly speaking, the
more backward, it is not yet possible to
say what will be the . influence of the
European type of culture upon their
intellectual development.
The material side of their civilisation
will after a time conform to the
European type, though, perhaps, to
forms that are not the most pro-
gressive ; and even such faiths as
Buddhism and Islam may lose their hold
on those who come most into contact
with Europeans. But whether these
peoples will produce any new types of
thought or art under the stimulus of
Europe, as the Teutons and Slavs did
after they had been for centuries in con-
tact with the relics of Greco-Roman
culture, or whether they will be overborne
by and merely imitate and reproduce
what Europeans teach them — this is a
question for conjecture only, since the
data for predictions are wanting.
It is a question of special interest
as regards the Japanese, the one non-
European race which, having an Old
civilisation of its own, highly developed
on the artistic side, has shown an amazing
aptitude for appropriating European in-
stitutions and ideas. Already a Japanese
physiologist has taken high rank among
men of science by being one of the
discoverers of the bacillus of the
Oriental plague.
DOES HISTORY MAKE FOR PROGRESS?
ONE of the questions which both the
writers and the readers of a History of
the World must frequently ask themselves
is whether the course of history establishes
a general law of progress. Some thinkers
have gone so far as to say that this must
be the moral of history regarded as a
whole, and a few have even suggested
that without the recognition of such a
principle and of a sort of general guidance
of human affairs towards this goal, history
would be unintelligible, and the doings of
mankind would seem little better than
the sport of chance.
Whatever may be thought of these
propositions as matters of theory, the
doctrine of a general and steady law
of progress is one to which no historian
ought to commit himself. His business
is to set forth and explain the facts
exactly as they are ; and if he writes
in the light of a theory he is pretty
certain to be unconsciously seduced into
giving undue prominence to those facts
which make for it. Moreover, the question
is in itself a far more complex one than
the simple word " progress " at first
sight conveys. What is the test of
progress ? In what form of human ad-
\iru • «k vance is it to be deemed to
What IS the ^o^j-i^t ? Which of these forms
Pro*°ess? ^^ "^ ^^^ highest value?
rogress -p^erc Can be no doubt of the
advance made by man in certain direc-
tions. There may be great doubt as to
his advance in other directions. There
may possibly be no advance but even
retrogre^ssion, or at least signs of an
5f>
approaching retrogression, in some few
directions. The view to be taken of the
relative importance of these lines of
movement is a matter not so much for
the historian as for the philosopher, and
Wh M ^^^ discussion would carry us
.... *'^' away into fields of thought not
Ah" d fitted for a book like the pre-
sent. Although, therefore, it
is true that one chief interest of history
resides in its capacity for throwing light
on this question, all that need here be
said may be expressed as follows :
There has been a marvellous advance in
man's knowledge of (he laws of Nature and
of his consequent mastery over Nature.
There has been therewith a great increase
in population, and, on the whole, in the physical
vigour of the average individual man.
There has been, as a further consequence,
an immense increase in the material comfort
and well-being ol the bulk of mankind, so
that to most men necessaries have become
easier ol attainment, and many things which
were once luxuries have become necessaries.
Against this is to be set the fact that
some of the natural resources of the
world arc being rapidly exhausted. This
would at one time have excited alarm ;
but scientific discoveries have so greatly
extended man's capacity to utilise other
sources of natural energy, that people are
disposed to assume that the loss of the
resources aforesaid will be compensated
by further discoveries.
As to progress other than material — that
is to say, progress in intellectual
INTRODUCTION BY RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
capacity, in taste, in the power of
enjoyment, in virtue, and generally in
what is called happiness — every man's
view must depend on the ideal which he
sets before himself of what constitutes
hai)piness, and of the relative importance
to happiness of the ethical and the non-
ethical elements which enter into the con-
. ception. Until there is more
The Gam agreement than now exists or
*/* J has ever existed on these points,
t e OSS ti^gj-g is no use in trying to
form conclusions regarding the progress
man has made. Moreover, it is admitted
that nearly every gain man makes is
accompanied by some corresponding loss
— perhaps a slight loss, yet a loss. When
we attempt to estimate the comparative
importance of these gains and losses,
questions of great difficulty, both ethical
and non-ethical, emerge ; and in many
cases our experience is not yet sufficient
to determine the quantum of loss. There
is room both for the optimist and for the
pessimist, and in arguing such questions
nearly everybody becomes an optimist or
a pessimist. The historian has no
business to be either.
There is another temptation besides
that of dehvering his opinion on these
high matters, of which the historian does
well to be aware — I mean the temptation
to prophesy. The study of history as a
whole, more inevitably than that of the
history of any particular country or
people, suggests forecasts of the future,
because the broader the field which we
survey the more do we learn to appreciate
the great and wide-working forces that
are guiding mankind, and the more
therefore are we led to speculate on the
results which these forces, some of them
likely to be permanent, will tend to bring
about.
This temptation can seldom have been
stronger than it is now, when we see all
mankind brought into closer relations
than ever before, and more
° *'"'* obviously dominated by forces
as cry o ^^.j^j^j^ 3^j-g essentially the same,
though varying in their form.
Yet it will appear, when the problem is
closely examined, that the very novelty
of the present situation of the world — the
fact that our mastery of Nature has been
so rapidly extended within the last century,
and that the phenomena of the sub-
jugation of the earth by Europeans and
of the ubiquitious contact of the advanced
and the backward races are so unexampled
in respect of the area they cover — that all
predictions must be uttered with the
greatest caution, and due allowance made
for elements which may disturb even the
most careful calculations. It may, indeed,
be doubted whether any predictions of a
definitely positive kind — predictions that
such and such things will happen — can
be safely made, save the obvious ones
which are based on the assumption that
existing natural conditions remain for
some time operative.
Taking this assumption to be a legiti-
mate one, it may be predicted that popu-
lation will continue to increase, at least
till the now waste but habitable parts of
the earth have been turned to account ;
that races, except where there is a marked
colour hue, will continue to become inter-
mingled ; that the small and weak races,
and especially the lower set of savages,
will be absorbed or die out ; that fewer
and fewer languages will be spoken ; that
communications will become even swifter,
_ easier, and cheaper than they
A Ghmpsc ^^g ^^ present : and that com-
!c*°r * merce and wealth will continue
the Future ^^ ^^^^^^ subject, perhaps,
to occasional checks from political
disturbance.
There are also some negative predictions
on which one may venture, and with a
little more confidence. No new race can
appear, except possibly from a fusion of
two or more existing races, or from the
differentiation of a branch of an existing
race under new conditions, as the
Americans have been to some slight
extent differentiated from the Enghsh, and
the Brazilians from the Portuguese (there
having been in the latter case a certain
admixture of negro blood), and as the
Siberians of the future may be a different
sort of Russians. Neither is any new
language hkely to appear, except mere
trade jargons (hke Chinook or pigeon
English), because the existing languages
of the great peoples are firmly established,
and the process of change within each
of these languages has, owing to the
abundance of printed matter, become now
extremely slow. Conditions can hardly be
imagined under which such a phenomenon
as the development of the Romance
languages out of Latin, or of Danish and
Swedish out of the common Northern
tongue of the eleventh century, could
recur.
57
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
any forecast. Conditions
might conceivably come
into action which would
split up some or most of
the present great States,
and bring the world
back to an age of small
political communities.
So, too, though the
lower forms of paganism
are fast vanishing, and
the four or five great
religions arc extending
It may seem natural
to add the further predic-
tion that the great States
and the great religions
will continue to grow
and to absorb the small
ones. But wlion we
touch to])ics into wlii( li
human opinion or emo-
tion enters, we touch a
new kind of matter,
where the influences now
at work may be too
much affected l)y new
influences to permit of
58
THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD AT PEACE
From the statuary groups on the Albert Memorial.
INTRODUCTION BY RT. HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
their sway, it is con-
ceivable that new pro-
phets may arise, found-
ing new faiths, or that
the existing rehgions
may be spht up into
new sects widely di-
verse from one another.
Even the supremacy
of the European races,
well assured as it now
appears, may be reduced
by a variety of causes.
THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD AT PEACE
From the statuary groups on the Albert Memorial.
physiological or moral,
when some centuries
have passed.
Whoever examines the
predictions made by the
most observant and
l)rofound thinkers of the
past will see reason to
distrust almost all the
predictions, especially
those of a positive order,
which shape them-
selves in our minds
to-day.
James Bryce
59
Ht^Iia^
SUMMARY OF WORLD HISTORY
A CHRONOLOGY OF
By Arthur D
WITH
TEN
THOUSAND YEARS
Innes, M.A.
WITHIN the memory of living men,
the most advanced ])eoples of the
world believed that the world itself had
been created not 6,000 years ago. We
have all learned now that the globe itself,
that life — and long later mankind — came
into being thousands, hundreds of thou-
sands— it may be millions — of years ago.
How long precisely, none can tell.
What we do know with certainty is that
before the continents finally emerged in
their present shape there was an Ice Age,
immediately })receded by what is called
the Drift Age, and that as early as the
Drift Age man, the maker of implements,
lived, and did battle with the cave bear and
other monsters. Where man first came
into being, how he spread over the globe,
how the great races acquired their charac-
teristics, we can only conjecture.
Wherever and whenever man appeared,
the earliest traces show him to have been
a sociable animal living in communities.
The earliest unmistakable traces
of civilisation, order, polity.
The Birth
of the
Nations
are found in the basins of the
Nile and the Euphrates, dating
probably as far back as ten thousand
years ago. The people who built the
Pyramids had already advanced far in the
knowledge which gives man the mastery
over Nature ; and the Pyramids were built
certainly 3,000, and probably nearer 5,000,
years before the Christian era. And while
those pristine civilisations rose and fell in
Egypt, civilisations were rising and pass-
ing away in Mesopotamia also.
In the fourth millennium there appears
first a peoi)le with new characteristics —
the Semitic race, gradually dominating
the Mesopotamian civilisation, spreading
westward in successive waves to the
Mediterranean, surging into Egypt and
out again ; creating the Emjiires of
Babylonia and of Assyria, and the Phoeni-
cian and Canaanite nations. And while the
Semite Empires rose and fell, and Egypt
held upon her ancient way, still mightier
nations were coming to birth. The great
Aryan or Indo-Eurojjean migrations began,
60
the Celt, the Latin, and the Hellene rolling
westward by the Euxine and the Northern
Mediterranean ; while another group passed
southward, to the East of the Semites,
spreading the Aryan conquest over the
greater part of the Indian peninsula.
Of the doings of the great Semitic Powers
in the second millcnium B.C. we have some
knowledge from the Hebrew records ; and
^ r.- • yt'iii" hy year fresh light is
Conflicts ii it 1 u
- . . ^ thrown on those records by
of Ancient ■ .• 1 ^ 11 . 1
p mscriptions and tablets newly
discovered or newly decij)hered,
Egyptian, Assyrian, or Hittite. Of the
Hittite or early Syrian dominion we know
little enough, except that it successfully
defied the invading armies of Assyrian
kings and Egyptian Pharaohs. Before
1500 the Semite conquerors of Egypt, the
Hyksos, were driven out — an event asso-
ciated by some authorities with the
Hebrew Exodus. From this time the ebb
and flow of Egyptian and Assyrian dynas-
ties are more definitely recorded. In the
closing centuries the prosperity of Tyre
and Sidon reached its height, and the
theocratic Hebrew nationality formed a
kingdom. We become aware of Hellenic
or kindred Powers in Asia Minor, at Troy,
in Crete, at Mycenae ; of Acha^ans and
Danaans in Egypt.
Before another five hundred years had
passed, throughout the coasts and islands of
the ^gean Sea, iEolians, lonians,
The First j^Qj-j^ns established themselves
' ormation ^^ cities, and every city rapidly
01 otates • , i • -11 I
grew mto a highly-organised
State. Over the Mediterranean, to Southern
Italy, to Sicily, to Marseilles, the new Greek
civilisation carried its commerce and its
culture. In Italy the Latin races were in
like manner forming themselves into city-
states, develojiing conceptions of Govern-
ment undreamed of by Oriental minds.
Rome was founded, and acquired a leader-
ship. Throughout the Hellenic and the
Latin world the idea of civic freedom took
root ; the primitive monarchical systems
disappeared, and, through revolutions and
temporary despotisms, sometimes peaceful
TIAE-TABLE OF THE WORLD : B.C. 8000 to 500
This Chronology, prepared as a companion to the Summary of the World's History, sets forth
in tabular form for ready reference the events dealt with in the narrative on opposite pages
B.C.
8000
7000
6000
5000
4000
3000
1500
900
800
700
600
500
B.C.
Early civilisation of the Nile Basin. Egypt before the Pyramids.
Asiatic invasion of Egypt.
Pro-Semitic civilisations of the Euphrates Basin. Susa founded.
Invasion of Es;ypt by dyna,stic race, 5800. Mena rules all Egvpt. First dynasty, 5500.
Babylonian kingdoms of Sumer and Akkad. Ea founds Eridu and civilises Babylonia
Ej);ypt : The Pyramid builders. Great Pyramid built by Khufu (Cheops), 4700.
Earliest monuments to kings in Babylonia, 4700.
Egypt invaded from the north. First, or Babylonian, Semitic wave in the Euphrates
Valley. Rise of Babylonian kingdoms. Sargon and Naram-Sin, Semitic rulers of
Akkad. Midtlle kingdom of Egpyt. Revival of art. Twelfth dynasty (3400).
Gudea's rule in Babylon. Development of commerce, 3300.
Egypt invaded by the Hyksos, nomadic Semitic conquerors, the "Shepherd Kings."
Fifteenth Dynasty (2500). Second Hyksos movement (2250).
Conquest of Babylon by Elamites. Rule of Hammurabi ( Amraphel of Gen. xiv.), 2129.
Second, or Canaanite, Semitic wave, extending to the Mediterranean.
First Aryan migration westward over Europe, and southward ; conquest of Hindostan.
The Hyksos dominate Egypt. New kingdom. Eighteenth dynasty, 1580.
Expulsion of the Hyksos, about 1560.
Rise of Assyria.
The Kassite dynasty in Babjdon, about 1750-1130.
Hittite Empire in Syria.
Latin and Hellenic entry into Europe and Asia Minor.
Third (Aramaean) Semitic wave, dominating W. Asia, but absorbed in existing states.
Far East: Beginning of definite Chinese history', with the Chau dynasty.
E.GYPT : Nineteenth dynasty, Sethos and the Ramesides ; struggle with Hittite Empire.
Western Asia: Burnaburiash. 1380. Pashe dynasty in Babylon, 1130-1000.
Period of Phoenician prosperity.
Rise of the United Kingdom of the Hebrews.
Crete, Troy, and INIycenae. The Ionic and Doric migrations.
Western Asia : The Hebrew kingdom divided into Judah and Israel or Samaria.
Rise of Arama?an kingdom of Syria. Chaldean domination in Babylon.
Assyrian Middle Empire.
Egypt: Twenty-second dynasty ("Shishak" king of Egypt).
Europe : Early monarchical governments replaced usually by aristocracies.
Probable period of the Homeric poems.
Western Asia: Successful resistance of S5n'ia to Assyria.
Appearance of the (Aryan) Medes in the East.
Africa : Founding of Carthage.
Egypt : Domination of Ethiopians or Cushites.
Western Asia : Assyrian New Empire ; conquest of Syria, Samaria, and Babylon.
Lydian and Phrygian kingdoms in Asia Minor.
Europe : Development of city states in Greece and Italy. Lycurgan legislation of
Sparta, about 800.
Rome founded as a monarchy, 753.
S]iread of Greek colonies along Mediterranean coasts and islands.
Western Asia : Extension of Lydian kingdom in Asia Minor. 687-546.
Irruption of Cimmerians from the North.
Repulse of Sennacherib before Jerusalem. Decline of Assyria.
Egypt : Invasion by Esarhaddon. Expulsion of Cushites. The Saitic dynasty.
Europe : Between 700 and 500, sporadic displacement of aristocracies by " tyrannies,"
followed either by an oligarchical restoration or by democracies.
Rome becomes head of the League of Latin cities.
Far East : Japanese history begins.
western Asia: Narhonaul, Kmg ot Babylon (556-53S). Overthrow of Assyrian
by New Baby'onian Empire ; the Babylonish captivity.
Rise of Media, of which Cyrus, the Persian, makes himself master.
Persian Em])ire: Overthrow of Lydia, New Babylonia, and Egypt. Aahmes
(.Xniasis), 570-526.
Far East : Confucius and Lao-Tse in China, and Buddha in India.
Europe: Greek states consolitlated. Athens: Solon 594. Pisistratidae expelled, 510.
Rome: Expulsion of the kings, about 510. The Commonwealth. Administration
aristocratic : Army and legislative assembly on basis of land-ownership.
Etruscan — pre-Latin — domination in Italy.
61
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
and sometimes violent, the States took on
for the most part a Repubhcan form.
In the East an Aryan Power overthrew
the last of the Assyrian-Babylonian dy-
nasties ; but these Persian conquerors
became assimilated to the conquered
nations. Fundamentally their empire
was of the same type as its predecessors.
The Persian sway, however, extended not
only into Egypt but over the partly
Hellenised Asia Minor ; and the Ionic
revolt, in the first year of the fifth century
B.C. brought the spirit of the East and
the spirit of the West into fierce collision.
The great king hurled his hosts against
defiant Hellas ; at Marathon and at
Salamis, Athens shattered his army and
his fleets. Thenceforth, for a thousand
years, the West was the aggressor.
But the rolling back of the " barbarian "
tide was not the only glory that fell to
Athens ; in that same century the little
state bore sons whose names
t?* *k '^t'^"*^ ^^ the front rank of the
, "^f , immortals for all time : ^Eschy-
immortals , 11-^11 t->i ■ t
lus and Sophocles, Phidias,
Pericles, Socrates, and Plato ; in the next
half century, Demosthenes ; with others
almost if not quite, on the same plane. The
character of Athens, idealised, no doubt,
is epitomised by Thucydides in the
speech of Pericles. She was the sum of all
that was best and nolilcst in Hellenism —
its love of freedom, of beauty, of energy,
of harmony, and its public spirit. Politi-
cally, the story of the period which
followed Salamis is mainly one of the
rivalry between Athens and Sparta ;
until the rise of Macedon, when King
Philip made himself master of all Hellas.
Then, with the beginning of the last
quarter of the fourth century, Alexander
the Great blazed upon the world, toppled
_, the emjiires of Western Asia
^ . Ixfnre him, conquered Egypt,
^rAi-,,-^—''^"'^' swo])t over the great moun-
tain-barriers into India, where
Buddhism had already begun to displace
the ancient Brahmanism of the first Aryans.
The Greek influences did not long linger
in the far East after the great conqueror's
death. His empire broke up. Asia
west of the Euj)hrates remained, indeed,
under the dominion mainly of one Grecian
dynasty, the Seleucid.-e ; Egypt under that
of another, the Ptolemies. Yet Alexan-
der's attempts to blend East and West
failed. Orientalism aliode, unconquercd,
ineradicable ; Hellenism prevailed almost
62
after the fashion of British domination in.
India to-day, in the land, but not of it.
Meanwhile, the struggle between Aryans
and non-Aryans had been running a
partly separate course in the West, The
Phoenicians of Carthage and the pre-
Aryan Etruscans, the dominant power in
Italy, made a joint assault on the Greeks
of Sicily and the Latins of the mainland
at the beginning of the fifth century.
They were beaten back, but for a century
the struggle continued between Rome and
Veii. The great Celtic incursion of the
Gauls threatened destruction to Rome,
but completed the destruction of Etruria.
In the fourth century and the first half of
the third century B.C. Rome was chiefly
engaged in the double task of achieving
supremac}^ passing into actual dominion
among the Latin states, and of establishing
the great Senatorial oligarchy, against
whose stubborn resolution the Epirote
Pyrrhus hurled himself in vain.
Just sixty years after Alexander's
death began the sixty years' struggle
between Rome and Carthage, in the latter
years of which the genius of Hannibal was
pitted against the grim persistence of the
Roman oligarchy. Carthage fell ; Rome
triumphed, and with her triumph entered
on her career of extended conquest.
The organisation which had ruled the
city-state itself not ill, and raised it to an
immense pre-eminence, sufficed also to
maintain its powers of conquest,
but not its political virtue,
Rome's armies subdued the di-
vided and disorganised realms
which more or less recognised the over-
lordship of Macedon ; they made the
Ptolemies and the Seleucids acknowledge
their supremacy ; they shattered the new
barbarian hordes, which began to pour
across the Alpine passes, and the African
tribes of Numidia. But the lofty public
spirit was gone which had made Rome
so great when she was battling for life.
Reformers arose, only to prove that
there was no power in the constitution
strong enough to enforce reform. Vic-
torious generals with their legions behind
them began to dictate legislation ; Marius
and Sulla, democrats or reactionaries,
signalised their political successes by
slaughtering hecatombs of their opponents.
At last, statesmanship and generalship
found their supreme incarnation in one
person, Julius Ca\sar. For many years
one of the two foremost men in the
The
Triumph of
Rome
TIAE-TABLE OF THE WORLD: B.C. 500 to 1
Collision of East and West. The Glory of Greece. Alexander and His Conquests. The
Rise of Rome. Overthrow of Carthage and the Establishment of the Roman Empire
B.C.
500
450
The East and Africa
Greece: Revolt of Ionian (iieeks from Persia,
499.
Liberation from Persia of Greek States in Asia
Minor.
Revolt of Egypt from Persia : re-conquest.
Egypt again independent of Persia.
Revival of Persian energy under Artaxerxes
Ochus.
Europe
Greece : Repulse of Persia at Marathon (490),
Salamis (480) and Plataea (479) and of
Carthage by Syracuse at Himera (4S0).
Rome: Increase of political power of Plebeians.
Tribunes. First Roman Legal Code (the XII.
Tables).
Greece : Age of Pericles, the great Athenian
dramatists, and Phidias.
Struggle for supremacy between Athens and
Sparta.
Rome : Decadence of Etruscan power.
Progress of Plebeians in obtaining adminis-
trative power.
Greece: Socrates and Plato.
Spartan and Theban supremacies.
Rome: Invasion by the (iauls.
The land question: the Licinian Laws.
Establishment of new •' Senatorial " oligarchy.
Extension of Roman military settlements or
colonies.
Overthrow of Persia by Alexander ; India
invaded.
Partition of Alexander's Empire. The Ptolemies
in Egypt, and the Seleucidas in Asia.
Friendly relations between Seleucus and
Chandragupta of Hindostan.
Greece: Philip of Macedon. Demosthenes
at Athens. Aristotle.
Conquests of Alexander the Great, 334-322.
Rome : Second Roman treaty with Carthage.
Dissolution of Latin League. Supremacy of
Rome in Italy. Samnite wars.
Contests between Syria (Seleucida;) and Egypt
(the Ptolemaic dynasty).
Asoka, kingof Maghada (Hindostan), Kuddhist.
Extension of the Seleucid dominion under
Antiochus the Great.
Rise of the Parthian dominion of the Arsacida;.
Fall of Carthage, 202.
Rome : Legislative power of Plebeian Comitia
Tributa established.
Pyrrhus in Italy and Sicily.
Treaty between Rome and Egypt.
Senatorial supremacy at Rome.
First Punic War (264-241).
Greece : Rise of the Achaean League.
Carthaginian power established in Spain.
Rome: Second Punic War, 218-201. Hannibal in
Italy, 21S-203. Scipio in Spain, 2ii-2of).
Zama, 202.
Extension of Roman dominion over Spain and
North Africa.
Wars between Parthia and the Seleucida-.
Maccabean revolt of Juda-a.
Antiochus Ejiiphanes conquers Egyjit, but
retires.
Egypt and Syria become Roman protectorates.
Organisation of provinces subject to the Imperial
Republic.
History of Europe merges in that of Rome.
Collision of Rome with (i) Macedon; (2) the
Syrian kingdom of the Seleucida;.
Macedon becomes a Roman province.
Rome assumes protectorate of Egypt and Syria.
Nabatxan .State in Arabia.
A Tartar kingdom established in east of Parthia.
Jugurthan War in Africa.
Third Punic War, and destruction of Carthage,
146.
Greek States absorbed into province of Mace-
donia.
Development of political power of (i) dema-
gogues; (2) soldiers.
The Gracchi, 133-121.
Conquest of .Soutli Gaul: defeat of Teutones
and Cimbri by Marius.
Mithradatic wars, 88-63.
The East, to the Euphrates, brought under
Roman dominion.
Jud;ea: fall of the Maccabees.
Social war. Marius and Sulla. The Proscriir
The Sullan Constitution, 81. [tions.
Pompey. Rise of Julius Ca?sar.
The East brought under Roman dominion.
Cassar conquers Gaul ; lands in Britain.
Scythian or Tartar incursion into India, and
admixture with Punjab races.
Egypt becomes a Roman province, 30.
Overthrow of Pompey : Caesar virtual emperor.
Murder of Caesar, 44.
Rivalry of Antony and Octavian, 43-30.
The Principate, or Empire, established under
Augustus (Octavian) in virtue of the Ini-
periuni I^rcconsulare (27) and Tribunicia
Potestas (23). The PZmpire organised.
Cicero, Virgil, Livy, Horace.
63
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Republic, he finally crushed his rival
Pompeius and became acknowledged head
of the state. Before he could complete
the work of reconstruction, Casar fell
beneath the daggers of Republican enthu-
siasts ; but ere many years had passed
his adopted son Octavian triumphed over
all rivals, and established the Principate
or Empire, the absolute dominion of one
ruler over the whole Roman world —
although that dominion was still main-
tained under the Republican forms.
A tremendous event in itself, the reign
of Augustus also witnessed one which has
had a great influence on the history of the
world — the birth of Christ. His ministry,
Th B' fh *° which perhaps the term
- pvent should be applied, was
Christ during the reign of the
second Emperor, Tiberius. The
new laith born on the soil of Judaea was
to modify profoundly all the ideals, social
and political as well as theological and
personal, of the entire Western world ;
but for many years its adherents remained
nothing more than a persecuted yet
steadily growing sect ; suspected and
hated as anarchists rather than as mis-
believers, in a world where the rankest
and wildest superstitions lived side by
side with a general intellectual scejiticism.
For four centuries the Imperial city
ruled over nearly the whole known
world. Beyond the Euphrates on the
east, beyond the Rhine and the Danube,
she could maintain no permanent
footing ; within her own borders it
seemed as though her sway became a j^art
of the natural order — so much so that
when her power had jiassed away her
very conquerors did her homage and took
upon themselves titles as her officers.
P)Ut the overthrow was yet a long way off.
The reconstruction organised by Augustus
_ . and his Ministers was developed
Y^^^ by able rulers — Tibenus, Tra-
Decline J'*"' Hadrian, the Antonines—
during some two hundred
years, in spite of intervals when a mur-
derous tyranny or a feeble incompetence
occupied the throne of the Cresars. From
the Pillars of Hercules to the river of
Mesojiotamia, northward as far as Britain,
.southward to the deserts of Africa, Roman
civilisation, Roman law and justice, Roman
military discipline, and Roman roads
maintained the Roman peace.
Then came an era when the Imperial
purple became the ])rize of successful
64
generals acclaimed by their legions ; and
the frontier armies, themselves largely
formed out of Teutonic or other semi-
" barbarian " tribes, found themselves face
to face with new barbarian hordes which
for another century and a half they held in
check. But the tremendous external pres-
sure on frontiers so vast made it impera-
tive that the Government should be some-
what decentralised. At the end of the
third century Diocletian parted the empire
into four great divisions. The new system
i:> 11 rn could uot cudurc I Constautine
Fall of Rome .1 /- . 1 1
. the Great agam became sole
„. rr- ». emperor. Under himChiisti-
KiseoiOoths .f , , ,, , ,
anity was at length adojited as
the state religion ; the Church herself be-
came a fundamental factor in the political
system ; and the political centre of gravity
was transferred from Rome to Byzantium.
Again the empire was partitioned, and
then, for a brief while before the end of
the fourth century, united again under
Theodosius. But the end was at hand. For
a few years the great general Stilicho held
the Teutonic Goths at bay in Italy, while
Vandals and Sueves poured through Gaul
into Spain. Then, early in the fifth cen-
tury, Stilicho died. Alaric led his conquer-
ing hordes to the gates of Rome, and sacked
the Eternal City. His successor, Ataulf,
took his Goths away, to drive the Vandals
out of Spain into Africa, and set up a great
western kingdom on their own account.
But after the Goths, fresh barbarians
swarmed in — Tartar Huns under Attila,
who wrought huge devastation and then
vanished for ever ; then fresh Teutonic
armies, which took possession of Italy,
though in the East the Em})ire still held
its own. And in Gaul the (German)
Franks under their king, Clovis (Chlodwig,
Ludwig), established the dominion which
was to give its name to France when the
Prankish element had almost passed out
of the country. Far-away Britain had
already been abandoned, and was falling
a ])rcy to the Saxons and the Angles, the
" English " who were driving the earlier
Celtic inhabitants before them into the
. . motmtain fastnesses of the west
^^eginning ,^j^^j j^^^j.^j^ Again, in the East,
Byzantium "^ *'"' sixth century, the empire
centrcfl at I^yzantuun asserted
its power. Justinian is memorable for that
great codification of Roman Law on
which the legal systems of half the jurists
in Europe have been based. His reign is
famous also for the exploits' of his brilliant
TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD
A.D. 1 to 500
Organisation of the Roman Empire. The Rise of Christianity. Partition of the
Empire. The Barbarian Invasion and Fall of the Western Empire. Rise of the Franks
A.D.
50
ISO
250
300
350
The East and Africa
Europe
liejiinning of the Christian -Era.
Imperial system completed under Tiberius.
Rhine, Danube, and Euphrates form frontiers
of'the Empire.
Caligula and Claudius emperors.
Britain: Roman occupation.
Spread of Christianity.
DL'struction of Jerusalem by Titus, 70.
Nero emperor: (ialba, Otho, Vitellius.
Vespasian : the " Flavian " emperors.
Nerva cliosen by Senate in succession t(.
Domitian. The "Five good Emperors,"'
96-180.
Succession of Trajan, 98.
Arabia designated as a Roman province.
Traj in's expedition to the Persian Gulf unsuc-
cessful. Eastward expansion of Rome
checked.
Trajan's campaigns in Dacia.
Administration organised under Hadrian.
Roman law systematised by Salvius Julianas
Antoninus Pius.
400
450
500
A.D.
Establishment of Roman supremacy in Armenia.
Successful campaigns of Severus against Par-
thians.
Persian kingdom of the Sassanides displaces
the Parthian Empire.
Development of Roman civilisation in Gaul
and Spain.
Campaigns of Marcus Aurelius in Pannonia.
The legions in Illyria, largely composed of
" barbarians," acquire power.
After Commodus, series of emperors by military
selection.
Severus temporarily assigns the West to Clodius
Albinus.
Further systematising of Roman law by the
juris coiisuiti, Ulpian, etc.
Increasing pressure of I eutonic tribes on the
frontier. Campaigns of Maximinus.
Decius emperor : official persecution of
Christianity.
Overthrow of Emperor \'alerian in the East by
the Persians.
Destruction of Palmyra in the reign of
Zenobia.
Extension of Buddhism in China.
Advance of the Goths and .Alemanni checked
by Claudius and .Aurelian.
Diocletian emperor. Division of the I^mpin-
under a subordinate '',\ugustus" and tw^
subordinate " Ca;sars "
Last persecution of Christians under Dio
cletian.
Constantine the Great.
Constantinople (New Rome, Byzantium) i>
made the centre of the Empire.
Christianity established as the State religion
Council of Nica;a.
Unsuccessful Roman campaign against Persia.
Temporary revival of Paganism under Julian
the Apostate.
Advance of the Goths checked by Theo-
dosius.
Empire separated into P'ast and West, 396.
Alaric the Visigoth held in check in the
Western Empire by Stilicho.
Westward movement of Vandals through Gaul
to Spain.
Vandals, expelled from Spain, established in
Africa.
Sack of Rome by Alaric, after death of Stilicho.
End of the Roman occupation of Britain.
The Goths withdraw westwards. Establish-
ment of the Visigothic kingdom of Theoderic
in Spain and Ar|uitania.
Irruption of the Huns under Attila.
Britain : The coming of the Saxons.
Barbarian " Patricians" set up and depose
Western Emperors.
Odoacer, " King " in Italy, r cognises supremacy
of the Eastern Emperor Zeno.
Theoderic the Ostrogoth founds a Teutonic
State in Italy.
Rise of the Franks in (laul, und'-r Clovis.
65
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
general, Belisarius, who destroyed the
Vandal kingdom in Africa, restored the
Imperial rule in Italy, and recovered
provinces in Asia which had been in danger
of falling into the grip of the now aggressive
rulers of Persia. But in the West, the suc-
cess was only temporary. Under pressure
of Tartar or Slav^onic hosts from the
East, a fresh Teutonic swarm, the Lom-
bards, entered Italy and mastered the
North. The significance of Rome now lay
in the supremacy of her pontificate, un-
acknowledged in the East.
In Spain, the Gothic supremacy gave
promise of an orderly and just govern-
ment. In the wide realms of the Franks
anarchy and bloodshed were almost cease-
less. In neither did the dominant Teutons
drive out the older Iberian and Celtic
populations, as the English were doing in
the open lands of the northern island. In
both, the German institutions were de-
veloping into that feudal system which
was utterly incompatible with the main-
tenance of a strong central rule, since it
enabled a powerful vassal to bid defiance to
his nominal suzerain. Throughout the
sixth and seventh centuries progress was
stayed in ancient Gaul ; in Spain it was
to be revolutionised by a new invader.
Eastward, at the end of the sixth cen-
tury, the Slavonic wave was surging upon
the empire's northern frontier ; in Asia,
Persia was again forcing her
way towards the Mediterra-
nean. Both were checked by
the Emperor Heraclius early
in the seventh century. But, meantime, a
new Power had come into being. Moham-
med had arisen. Inspired by the fanatical
fervour of Islam, the warriors of Arabia,
soon to be known as the Saracens, swept
all before them. They did not at first make
P2uro}ie their objective ; the Caliphs car-
ried their conquering arms over Western
Asia, into Egypt, and along the southern
coasts of the Mediterranean. Then they
began to beat against the emj^re itself.
The eighth century had hardly opened
when they poured into Spain ; dissensions
among the Gothic chiefs gave them prompt
victory. They swept up to the Pyrenees ;
but their advance was stayed by Charles
Martel, the virtual lord of the Frankish
kingdom. On the East their armies as-
sailed Constantinople, Init were disastrously
repulsed by the Emperor Leo the Isaurian.
Now, for the first time, Paj^al sanction
was demanded and obtained for a change
66
Islam
Being
of dynasty. The last Merovingian king
of the Franks was deposed in favour of
Pepin, the son of Charles Martel. He was
succeeded by his son, Karl, a German of
the Germans, despite the French form of
his popular title Charlemagne.
During his long reign the ■Vloors in Spain
were driven back beyond the Ebro ; the
Saxon tribes across the Rhine were forced to
-. , submit and to accept Christi-
„. anity; the Lombard oppres-
j, . sors of Italy were vanquished ;
and on the Pope's initiative,
Charlemagne himself was acclaimed and
crowned at Rome as emperor and suc-
cessor of the Caesars. All of the West that
remained to Byzantium was Southern
Italy. The revived empire came into being
on Christmas Day, a.d. 800.
The great dominion and the organisation
constructed by Charlemagne fell into-
divisions after his death. The lands east of
the Rhine remained German ; on the west,
the Teutonic forces yielded to the Latin-
ised Celtic sp)irit. Slowly France and Ger-
many emerged. In England the supremacy
among the rival peoples passed from the
Angles of Northumbria or of the Midlands
to the Saxon house of Wessex. Hungary
was held by the Mongolian Avars, presently
to be displaced by their Magyar kinsmen ;
otherwise Eastern Europe, Illyria, as well
as the Trans-Danube districts, was being
gradually possessed by the Slavonic races.
Their westward movement was decisively
stayed in the tenth century by Henry the
Fowler and Otto the Great, who, for the
second time, revived the " Holy Roman
Empire " in the West in a form which
effectively translated it into the " German
Emi)ire." Meanwhile, the Vikings from
the north first ravaged the western coasts,
then wrung great provinces from the kings
of England, and of " Francia," prei')aring
for the day when the Norman spirit should
set the tone of Western Europe.
In the Eastern Mohammedan world the
Saracen dominion was passing to Tartar
races — to the Seljuk Turks or the Ghaz-
navid Turks, and later to the Ottomans ;
the genuine Saracens had
'^ . ?. seen their greatest days in
Feudalism - ■' -
in Europe
the times of Harun-al-Raschid,
when the Frankish Empire
of Charlemagne was being dismem-
bered. Europe in the eleventh century had
passed, or was passing, into what is dis-
tinctively known as the Feudal Period, or
later Middle Ages. Everywhere it became
TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: A.D. 500 to 1000
Teutonic Races Dominate the West. Rise of Mohammed ; extension of Mohammedan
Rule from Cordova to Kabul. Western Empire Revived by Charlemagne and again by Otto
A.D.
500
550
600
650
700
750
800
850
900
950
1000
A.D.
The East and Africa
Overthrow of the African Vandal kingdom by
IJelisarius, general of Justinian.
Europe
Franks predominant on Rhine and in (iaul.
Justinian emperor at Constantinople.
Roman Law codified in the Institutes.
Overthrow of Gothic kingdom in Italy by
Belisarius. [in England.
Advance of Saxons (South) and Angles (East)
Buddhism introduced in Japan.
.\dvance of Persia against the Eastern Empire.
Lombard conquest of North Italy.
Spread of Celtic Christianity in Britain by
St. Columba.
Pontificate of Gregory the Great.
Latin Christianity introduced into Kent by
St. Augustine, 597.
Overthrow of Persia by Emperor Heraclius.
Mun.VM.MED. The Hegira (622).
Conquest of Egypt and Syria by the Caliphs
Abu-bekr and Omar.
Conquest of Persia, and extension of Caliphate
over West Asia.
Saracens (Caliphate) attack the Empire in the
East and in ,\frica.
Rise of the Shiite sect of Mohammedans.
England: Supremacy of Northumbria.
Italy : North under Lombard dominion ;
South attached to the Eastern Emp re.
.Avar dominion in Hungary.
Slavonic settlement in Servia.
Engl..\nd: Final overthrow of Paganism.
Triumph of Roman over Celtic Christianity.
Franks: Dukes of Austrasia (East Franks)
dominate the Merovingian kings.
Revival in India of Brahmanism, gradually
developing into modern Hinduism.
Saracens (or Moors) overrun Spain.
Saracen advance checked by Emperor Leo the
Isaurian at Constantinople, and by Charles
Martel at Tours.
Beginning of the Iconolastic controversy. Dis-
cussions between Papacy and Eastern Church.
Division of the Caliphate into Eastern (Abassid)
at Bagdad and Western (Ommeiad) at
Cordova.
Rise of the Turks in the Caliphate armies.
Harun-al-Raschid Caliph at Bagdad.
England: Supremacy of Mercia.
Franks : Fall of the Merovingian dynasty.
Pepin the Short founds the Karling or Caro-
lingian Dynasty.
Empress Irene at Constantinople.
FR.A.NKS : Karl the Great (Charlemagne) suc-
ceeds Pepin as king of the F"ranks. He drives
the Moors beyond the Ebro, conquers the
Lombards, and is crowned as Roman Emperor
by the Pope. (800).
Increasing power of the Western Caliphate.
I'atemide Mohammedan dynasty established in
Egypt.
Decline of the Abassid Caliphs.
Subjugation of the Saxons by Charlemagne.
Division of Charlemagne's dominion among
his grandsons.
England : Supremacy of Wessex under Egbert.
The Danes, or Northmen, harry the coasts of
Europe.
Carolingian dominion divided into West
(Francia), East (Franconia, Germany),
Central (Burgundy) and Italy.
Pressure of Slavonic peoples on East Germany.
England; Atfred the Great. Settlement of
the Danes in the Danelagh. Organisation of
Government, Law, etc.
Advance of Magyars in Hungary.
Iceland colonised, 874-950.
Recovery of Eastern Provinces from the Sara-
cens by the Byzantine Empire.
France : Duchy of Normandy ceded to Rollo.
Norway united under Harold Haarfager.
England: House of Wessex kings of all England.
Germany : Henry the Fowler, Saxon King of
Germany, and his son Otto the Great, check
the Magyar advance.
Pressure of Slavs on Eastern Empire.
Empire: Otto becomes King of Italy and
Roman Emperor. The Holy Roman Empire
I is from tliis time definitely German.
: France: The Capet dynasty replaces the Caro-
I lingian.
I Slavs driven back by Eastern Emperors. Rus-
j rians Chiistianised. Slav dominion estab-
lished in Poland.
■07
HISTORY OP THE WORLD
the object of the great rulers to establish
a strong central government, and of the
Papacy to establish a supremacy over all
governments. Feudalism and the Papacy
were the rivals of the centralising tendency.
In England, where a Norman dynasty
and Norman aristocracy established them-
selves, the unifying process was astonish-
ingly raj^id. The country was compara-
tively shielded from Papal interposition by
distance. A series of vigorous
"^ ^^ and able monarchs prevented
P** pure feudalism from ever get-
ting developed ; it resulted that
in the thirteenth century baronage and
people made common cause in imposing
not feudalism, but constitutional control
over the kings. In France, the victory of
the crown over feudalism was far slower ;
the feudatories were too powerful, and
among them were the kings of England, as
dukes or counts of great territories within
France. The Hundred Years' War
was, in fact, not so much a contest for
the French crown as a struggle between
the French kings and their mightiest
vassals. It was not till the English had
been finally expelled that Louis XI.
was enabled to make the crown supreme
in France. There, as in England, the
monarchy never submitted to the Papacy ;
it was so far victorious in that struggle
that in the fourteenth century the seat
of the Roman pontificate was transferred
to Avignon, and the Pontiff himself
became literally the creature of France.
Spain and Byzantium alike remained
for the most part outside the general
Euro]")ean current. They were the buffers
between Christendom and Islam. In the
Spanish Peninsula the Moors were held
. more or less at bay, but the
ris en om j^^^| ^^^^ ^^^ freed from their
_ . dominion till the close of the
Crusades ^., ,, , ,, ..
nitecntli century, nyzantnun
held the Turks at bay till the middle of
the same century ; then she fell for ever.
Between the eleventh and thirteenth
centuries, Christendom carried on against
Islam the long contest of the Crusades ;
but the warriors who took part in those
wars neither fought nor organised as
though them'^elvcs forming an organic
body ; the Christian hosts in Palestine
were mere miscellaneous gatherings, united
only in the tcmjiorary fits of enthusiasm.
The Holy Sepulchre was gained, but with-
in a century it was lost again ; the
crusading cause was one to wliirh not
68
Empire,
Feudalism,
& Papacy
states, but individuals only, devoted |
themselves. Conquest would have been
possible only if the Crusaders had gone i
forth prepared to make their own homes i
in Asia. The East could not be held by I
garrisons with no abiding interest there. 1
Islam, then, held, and more than held, j
its own against the West ; while during '
these same centuries it swept east and south \
through the passes of the Punjab into
India, establishing Turk and Afghan king-
doms over most of the great peninsula ;
though the vast bulk of the popula-
tion there held to the Hinduism which,
born of the earlier Brahmanism, had '
almost expelled the Buddhist religion,
which, however, had established itself
permanently in Further India and China.
The might of Islam could have been
overthrown only by a united Christendom,
and for that the disintegrating forces
were too great. England and, more slowly, j
France freed themselves from feudalism. I
But Christendom required one head. If |
the Papacy had stood by the '
empire, feudalism might have
been broken down, and the
emjieror have become that
head. But the Papacy aimed at supremacy
for itself — the spiritual power was at war
with the temporal. Anti-imperial factions
claimed the support of the Church ; the
efforts at consolidation of the great
Hohenstaufen Emjierors, Barbarossa and '
Frederick II., were unsuccessful. The i
empire itself became only a congeries of
kingdoms and dukedoms, counties, bishop-
rics, free cities, and leagues of cities, under
the Austrian house of Hapsliurg ; while ,
Rome, mighty from the days of Gregory
VII. to Innocent III., lost its prestige
in the captivity at Avignon and by the
Great Schism which followed. In j
England Wycliffe's voice was raised ; on j
the south-east of the emjiire the Hussite
wars raged, premonitory of the Refor-
mntion.
In 1453 Constantinople fell, and the 1
Turk was permanently established in the ■
east of Europe. As a counterstroke, in
the west, not forty years later, I
the Moorish dominion in Spain
was wi])ed out, Spain emerging
as a united Christian kingdom.
Before the end of the century Columbus
and Gama had discovered America, and J
virtually rediscovered India. Across the |
ocean a new, almost unlimited field for
expansion, for enterprise, for rivalry had I
End of
the Middle
Ages
TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: A.D. 1000 to 1500
Development of Feudalism. The Rise and Decadence of the Papacy. The Crusades.
Holy Roman. Empire. The Organisation of England, France, and Spain. The Renaissance
A.D.
1000
1050
1 150
1250
1300
1350
I4C0
1450
1500
A.D.
1 he Non>Christian World
Mahnuid of Ghazni. Beginning of Moham-
medan invasions of India.
Power of the Seljuk Turkish Dynasty.
Christendom
."^candiiuivian power: Canute, King of Norway,
Sweden, Denmark, and Enjjland.
Francduian line of emperors ; Burgundy reunited
to Empire.
Dynasty of Hugh Capet in France.
England: The Norman conquest, 1066.
Norman conquests in Sicily and S. Italy.
Power of the Empire under Henry HI.
Pontificate of Gregory VII. (ilildebnuul).
Beginning of the strugnle between r..pacy
and Empire (Henry IV.)
First Crusade.
Development of Papal power.
England: Organisation of central govern-
ment under Henry I. checked under Stephen.
Norman kingdom of Sicily.
Conrad, first Holienstaufen emperor. He 'in-
ning of Guelphs (Papal) and (ihibellines
(imperial)
Establishment of Mohammedan (Ghori) dynasty
at Delhi.
Conquests of the Saracens under the Seljuk
.Saladin.
Third Crusade (Cceur-de-Lion).
The Angevin dominion of Henry II., comprising
half France.
England: End of feudal anarchy. Ma.ximuni
power of Crown. Henry worsted in the
struggle with the Church.
Chivalry typified in Richard Cccur-de-Lion.
P"rederick Barbarossa emperor, 1 155-1 i(>o
City development. Eombard League ; and
German Free Cities.
Advance of Moors in Spain.
Genghis Khan : Tartar conquests in Asia and
irruption into Europe.
Buddhism obsolescent in India.
Highest power of Papacy, under Innocent III.
Francis of Assisi : institution of Mendicant
Friars.
England: Magna Charta; contest of Crown
and Barons. Loss of Angevin dominion.
France : Development of central power under
Louis Vni. and IX.
Institution of the Teutonic knights.
Break up of the Eastern Empire. Venice.
Rise of the Ottoman (Othman) Turks.
Khublai Khan in Eastern Asia.
Decadence of Imperial power. First Habsburg
End of the Crusading period. [emperor.
Italy : Rise of Florence. Dante. Giotto.
England: Establishment of Parliament (Mont-
fort and Edward I.). Organisation of the
English nation.
Mameluke Sultans in Egypt.
The Pap.icy " in captivity " at .-Vvignon.
Independence of Scotland.
Independence of Switzerland
Ottoman Turks establish a footing in Europe.
England and France: Beginning of the
100 Years War.
Rise of the Ming dynasty in China : expulsion
of Mongols.
Conquests of Timur the Tartar (Tamerlane)
The Jacquerie in France.
The Great Schism : period of dual Papacy.
Engl-^nd: Peasant revolt. Failure of Richard
II.'s attempt at absolutism. Wycliffe.
Union of Lithuania with Poland.
Empires of Me.xico and Peru.
End of Great Schism. Hussite wars.
English contpiest of France, and subsequent ex-
pulsi(m Increasing powers of Parliament.
Invention of printing press.
Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus;
and of Cape route to India by Vasco da Gama.
Turks capture Constantinople.
England: Wars of the Roses, 1455-14S5.
Maritime greatness of PoRTUGiL. [Isabella.
Spain consolidated under Ferdinand and
France consolidated under Louis XI.
England con.solidated under Henry VII. Es-
tablishment of absolutism under constitu-
tional forms.
Revival of learning. Humanists. Savonarola.
69
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
been opened to the European peoples.
Already in the realms of intellect old
forgotten knowledge had been gradually
recovered by the Renascence, the revival
of learning and letters ; with the intellec-
tual expansion and the invention of the
printing press paths to new knowledge were
being opened. Men were shaking them-
selves free from the shackles of authority
and tradition. Hence, the sixteenth cen-
tury witnessed that revolt of half Western
Christendom from Rome which we call the
Reformation ; in its essence, though by no
means in its form at the first, a revolt
against the interposition of any human
authority between the individual man an i
his Maker. With that revolt political
and national divisions were inextricably
blended, while the whole was compli-
cated by the new conditions of political
supremacy created by the New World.
The next two centuries, then, saw
France, already a consolidated state,
develop into the first military Power
under the most absolute monarch in
Europe — through a stage of prolonged
religious strife which ended by
("ma establishing the tolerationist
j^ . Bourbon, Henry IV., on the
throne, through the rule of the
two great cardinals, Richelieu and
Mazarin, to the intolerant autocracy of
Louis XIV., with a close aristocracy no
longer in opposition to the crown but
allied to it.
In England the development was on
different lines. There we find an absolutist
movement, the outcome of the Wars of
the Roses. But however autocratic the
Tudors were, they held by constitutional
forms, and preserved the intense loyalty
of their people. On Ehzabpth's death,
a century-old matrimonial alliance placed
the sceptres of England and Scotland in
a single hand.
Then, on the theory of Divine right, the
Crown attempted to override the consti-
tution ; the Civil War gave the power
neither to king nor parliament, but to a
military dictator. On his death the coun-
try reverted to a compromise between
Crown and Parliament ; the Stuarts, again,
with the aid of their cousin, the autocrat
of France, attempted to recover absolu-
tism. They were driven from the country,
and constitutionalism — in effect, govern-
ment by an oligarchy of landowners — was
decisively established. The religious prob-
lem had found a decisively Protestant
70
Europe
solution at an early stage ; but Anglican-
ism and Puritanism soon grew mutually
intolerant ; it was only with the Revolu-
tion of 1688 that toleration and constitu-
tionalism definitely triumphed together.
Meanwhile, in the reign of Elizabeth,
England had asserted her intellectual
eminence by giving birth to Shakespeare
and to Bacon ; and had decisively dis-
placed Spain from the ruler-
ship of the seas. In the
n I * next century her colonisation
Development t t^t ,^ a
of North America counter-
balanced the Spanish dominion in the
south and centre of the Western Hemis-
phere, though it was not unchallenged by
France. In the East a great commercial
rivalry had grown up between English,
Dutch, and French — a rivalry still to be
fought out.
In the early years of the sixteenth
century matrimonial alliances had joined
Spain, the Low Countries, and the empire
under a single ruler, a Hapsburg of the
(Austrian) Imperial house. The vast do-
minion was extended by the acquisition
of the golden territories of the American
continent. The Empire passed to one
Hapsburg branch, Spain and her depend-
encies to another. In the empire, a tem-
porary tnodus Vivendi was established
between Roman Catholics and Protest-
ants ; but Spain, the colossus which
threatened to dominate Europe, was split
by the revolt of the Netherlands, and her
power shaken to its foundations by the
collision with England. In the
o ision sixteenth century, Germany
° ^ . was devastated by the religious
ynas les thirty Years War ; Austria
emerged only as the chief among a numl^er
of German states, and Holland won a
naval and commercial position second only
to that of England. The Ottoman Turks,
still aggressive, were still held in check.
In India, a Turkish dynasty known as the
Moguls (Mughals, Mongols) extended its
sway from Kabul to the mouth of the
Ganges, and almost to Cape Comorin.
At the opening of the eighteenth cen-
tury the aggressive Continental policy of
Louis XIV. involv^ed Eurojie in the " War
of the Spanish Succession." The French
king's armies were shattered by repeated
blows at the hands of Marlborough and
Eugene, but he finally obtained his primary
object, the recognition of his grandson as
king of Spain. The threat of a Hapsburg
domination passed into the threat of a
TIME-TABLE OF THE WORLD: A.D. 1500 to 1700
New World Entered, and East Re-entered. The Reformation. Organisation of European Nations
under Absolute Monarchies. Constitutional Struggle in England. English Naval Supremacy
A.D.
1500
1520
1540
1560
1580
1600
1620
1640
1660
1680
1700
A.D.
Asia and Africa
Tlie New World Ixistovved on Spain and
Portugal by the Bull of Pope Alexander \'I.
Portuguese dominion established in the Indian
seas by Albuciuerque.
Conquest of Egyjjt by Ottoman Turks.
Safid dynasty in Persia (" The Sofy ").
First circumnavigation completed, 1 522.
Invasion of Hindostan (Northern India) by
Baber, the first " Mogul" emperor, 1526.
E.\pu!sion of Moguls: dynasty of Sher Shah at
Delhi, 1540.
Francois Xavier in Japan.
Restoration of Moguls, 1556.
Rule of Akbar, 1556-1605.
Toleration of Hinduism.
Mogul dominion established and organised
throughout Northern India.
Development of Japanese Feudalism.
Reign of Jehan Gir in Hindostan, 1605-27.
First English factory at Surat, 1611.
First English Embassy to Delhi, 1615.
Reign of Shah Jehan, 1627-5S.
The I'aj Mahal built.
End of the Portuguese power in the East.
E.xtension of the Mogul dominion into the
Deccan.
Rise of the Manchu (Tartar) dynasty in China.
Reign of Aurangzib, 165S-1707.
Rise of the Mahrattas under Sivaji.
France enters the field in India.
Revival ot intolerant Mohammedanism by
Aurangzib.
Expansion of the Mogul Empire over Southern
India.
Europe and America
Raphael, Miciiael Angelo, and Titian.
Rivalry of Henry VIII. (1509-47), Francis I.
(1515-47), and Charles V. (1519-56), who
combines Spain, Burgundy, and the Empire.
Luther challenges the Papacy, 1517-20.
The Reformation era opens.
Turkish advance under Solyman the Magni-
ficent.
Gustavus Vasa in Sweden, 1523-60.
Spain conquers Me.xico (1520) and Peru (i53'i)-
Reformation : Subjection of Church to Crown
(England). Confession of Augsburg: Protes-
tant League. Calvin creates Presbyterianisni
Russia : Ivan the Terrible.
Order of Jesuits formally established.
Germany : Contest between Charles V. and
Protestant princes of Germany ended by com
promise at Peace of Augsburg.
England : Protestant Revolution (Edward VI.)
followed by Romanist reaction (Mary), and
final establishment of Protestantism (Eliza
beth) in England and Scotland.
Spain : Philip II. and the Inquisition.
Council of Trent defines limits of Roman
Catholicism.
France: Seriesof civil wars of religion, 1562-05
Revolt of Netherlands from Spain.
Turkish advance checked at Lepanto, 1571.
Portugal absorbed by Spain.
Gradual success of the Netherlands revolt.
English naval supremacy proved by the Armada
Decadence of Spain. ['S'^'^
France: Toleration secured by Henri TV.
Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.
Galileo and Bacon.
Union of English and Scottish Crowns, 1603.
Dutch and English commerce in the East Indies.
Virginia, first successful British colony in North
America, 1606.
Holland : Independence established, 1609.
Germany: Thirty Years' War begins, 1618-48.
Gustavus Adolphus.
Fr.-^nce : Richelieu organises absolutism.
England: Constitutional struggle between
Charles I. and ParHament. The Petition of
Right, 1628.
Portugal recovers independence.
France: Rule of Mazarin: absolutism estab-
lished, [protectorate.
England : Civil War, resulting in militar\
Thirty Years War ended by Peace of Westphalia.
Commercial and naval rivalry of English and
Dutch. [power.
Development of France into the leading military
France: LouisXIV. initiates policy of aggression
ENr.L.\ND: Charles II. undermines supremacy
of Parliament. Repression of Nonconformity
by Parliament.
Louis XIV. attacks Holland, with occasional
support from Charles II.
England: Attack on Romanism.
Aggressive movement of Turkey. [16S5.
France: Louis XIV. revokes Edict of Nantes,
Constitutionalism established in England by
the revolution of 168S.
Wars of England and Holland against France.
Russia: Peter the Great.
Newton and Leibnitz.
71
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Bourbon domination. In the east of
Europe a final limit was set to the Ottoman
aggression. In Britain, the incorporation
of Scotland was completed, formally by
the Union of 1707, effectively by the
suppression of Jacobitism in 1746.
From 1739 to 1763 Europe was again
plunged into wars, with an eight years'
interval. The motives of those wars, and
of the combinations of states on either side,
were complicated ; the results
e ing ^yere simple. Prussia, under
.. „ Frederick the Great, emerged
the Powers r . ^ T-. T-
as a nrst-class rower ; I' ranee
lost her North American Colonies to
Great Britain ; the British East India
Company defeated the attempt of the
French to establish a paramount influence
with the native princes, the Mogul EmjMre
having broken up into a congeries of prac-
tically independent satrapies ; and the
British themselves became established as a
territorial Power by the conquest of Bengal.
Russia also, organised at the beginning of
the century by Peter the Great, had taken
her place definitely among the great Powers.
During the next twenty years (1763-
1783) Poland was absorbed by her neigh-
bours. The British Empire was sundered
by the revolt of the older American
Colonies, which were established as the
United States of America ; while Canada
remained loyal. By this time the whole
of Europe was practically governed by
absolute monarchies ; but a cataclysm was
at hand. France became the scene of a
tremendous revolution. Crown and aris-
tocracy were toppled into the abyss.
France proclaimed herself the liberator
of the peoples ; the monarchs of Europe
coml)incd to suj)press the ]iroletariat.
., , During the last decade of the
Napoleon , , ..
. ,. century one revolutionary con-
and the ,-, ^ ■ -^ .^ ,, -^
„ , ,. stitution alter another was set
Revolution n u 1 ^i 1
up in Pans, while the revolu-
tionary armies shattered monarchical
armies, and turned the " liberated " j^eoples
into subject dependencies of the Rejiublic.
On the seas, however, Britain successfully
asserted her supremacy. Of the com-
manders of the Republic, the most bril-
liant was the Corsican Bonaparte. He
dreamed of making Egypt the basis for
achieving an Asiatic empire, and thence
overwhelming Europe ; but tlie dream was
shattered when he found himself isolated
by Nelson's destruction of the French fleet
at Aboukir in the Battle of the Nile.
Returning to Paris, he transformed the
72
republic into an empire : he set up his
brothers or his generals as rulers over half
the kingdoms in Europe ; he dictated terms
to every government except Britain. Bri-
tain annihilated his fleets, and fought and
beat his generals in the S})anish Peninsula.
He conquered the kings, but the nations
rose against him, and overthrew him ; his
last effort was crushed at Waterloo.
Absolutism was reinstated, but the
proletariats had learnt to demand freedom
Steam - power and steam - traction so
changed the conditions of production as to
revolutionise the relations between labour
and capital, and between the landed and
the manufacturing interests. In Great
Britain political power passed from the
landowners to the manufacturers with the
great Reform Bill of 1832, and from the
wealthy to the labouring classes with the
Franchise Bills of 1867 and 1884. Every
monaichy has been compelled to submit
to limitations of its own powers more or
less copied from Britian.
Britain herself, not untaught by the
breach with America, has learned to estab-
lish res})onsible government in her Colo-
nies, making them virtually
free states ; and among those
states the idea of federation has
taken root and is bearing fruit.
In India, challenged by one native race
after another, she has extended her sway
over the whole peninsula, and has abolished
the anomaly of governing her great depen
dency through a trading company. In the
West her kinsmen have raised the United
States into a mighty nation.
In Europe France has passed through
monarchy and republic and second
empire intx) a stable rejmblic ; Italy has
revolted against foreign rulers, and become
a united nation ; the small peoples of the
Balkan Peninsula have now achieved
by arms their liberty from Turkish rule.
Prussia has won the hegemony of the
German states, and established a new
German Empire. Russia, the bogey of
the West, and of Britain in particular,
has shown her weakness in collision with
the sudden development of Japan.
Finally, the Dark Continent has been
explored and partitioned : in the south,
after a sharp conflict, British and Dutch
are on the way to become a united people ;
in the north, Egypt has ])cen reorganised
under British administration. We end, as
we began, with the land of the Pyramids.
Arthur D. Innes.
The
World as
it is
TIAE-TABLE OF THE WORLD: A.D. 1700 to 1914
Struggle for Colonial Supremacy. French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Growth of Democ-
racy and Consolidation of European States. Colonial Extension of Responsible Government
A.D.
1700
1720
1740
1760
1780
1800
1820
1840
i860
1880
1910
A.D.
Asia, Africa, artd Australasia
Europe and America
War of Spanish Succession, 1702-13. Bourbons
established in Spain.
Career of Charles XII. of Sweden, 1697-1718.
Grkat Britain: Incorporating union of
England and Scotland, 1707 [Eugene, 1717.
Turkish advance decisively stopped by
Alliance of France and Great Britain.
Struggle between British and French in Southern
India, 1746-61.
Clive conquers Bengal; beginning of British
territorial power in India, 1757.
Anglo-Spanish War, combined with War of the
Austrian Succession, 1739-48.
Development of Prussian military power
under Frederick William.
Great Britain : End of Jacobitism (the
Forty-five) consolidates the union.
Seven Years' War (1756-63) : Prussia and Great
Britain against I'rance, Austria, and Russia.
Achievements of Frederick. Overthrow of
France at sea, and in Canada and India.
British dominion receives Mogul's sanction.
Haidar Ali in Mysore.
Governor-Generalship of Warren Hastings
(1774-S5), establishes the British power.
Dual control in India by East India Company
and Parliamentary Board of Control set up
by Pitt's India Act.
Administration of British India systematised.
Overtlirow of Mysore, and institution of sub-
sidiary alliances by Lord Wellesley.
Overthrow of Mahratta power by Lord Hastings
(1819) : e.xtensive annexations.
Acquisition of Cape Colony from Holland by
Great Britain.
Gradual planting of Australasian Colonies.
Aggressive Eastward movement of Persia
checked at Herat.
First Af. han Wars, 1S39-42.
China : First collision with Europe.
Treaties of Paris and Hubertsburg exclude
France from .\nierica and India, and confirm
the position of Prussia.
Partition of Poland.
Great Britain; Quarrel with Colonies; lead-
ing to War of American Independence, 1775-83.
British recovery of naval predominance.
United States: Independence established
F'rance : French Revoluton, 1789. [1783-
War between European Coalitions and French
Republic, 1792-1802. Rise of Bonaparte.
Triumphs of French Army and British Navy.
Great Britain : Legislative Union with
Kant and Goethe. [Ireland.
War renewed (1803) between European Coali-
tions and Emperor Napoleon (1804).
Trafalgar and Austerlitz, 1S05. Peninsula
War, 1808-13. Moscow Campaign, 181 2.
Waterloo Campaign, 1815 [the Holy alliance.
European reconstruction. Absolutist reaction :
Independence of South and Central American
Greek War of Independence, 1822-29. [States
France : Constitutional Monarchy under
Louis Philippe,' 1830-48.
Great Britain: Parliamentary Reform and
manufacturing development Railways.
Sikh Wars, 1845-49.
Annexations under Dalhousie.
Indian Mutiny, 1857. Transfer of Indian
Government to British Crown, 1858.
Japan : Admission of foreign traders.
Charles Darwin.
Revolutionary movements in Europe.
France: Republic (1S49) passing to Empire
of Napoleon III. (1852).
Crimean War, 1854-56. [British Colonies.
Establishment of responsible goverment in
Japan : Revived power of the Mikado.
Advance of Russia in Central Asia towards
India.
Second Afghan War, 1878-80.
Mahdism in the Eastern Sudan; ended at Om-
durnian in 189S. British control establislied.
Partition of Africa into " Spheres of Influence."
War between China and Japan.
Annexation of Philippines by United States.
South African War (189Q-1902) and incorpora-
tion of Dutcii States into British Empire.
Federation of Australian Colonies, igoi.
War between Russia and Japan, 1904-5.
American Civil War, 1861-65. Abolition of
Slavery. Independence of United Italy under
Victor Emmanuel. [States 1866.
Prussia acquires leadership of German
Franco-Prussian War, 1870-71. New German
hmpire, and new French Republic.
Russo-Turkish War, 1S77-78.
China: Revolution: Manchu dynasty displaced
by Republic, 1912. [1912.
Tripoli annexed by Italy from Ottoman Empire,
British control established in Egypt.
Repeated disturbances in the lialkan States
established by the Russo-Turkisb War
First Peace Conference of European powers at
the Hague, 1899.
Norway seuaratesfroni Sweden and elects King
Haakon, 1905
Second Peace Conference at the Hague, 1907.
Allied Balkan States defeat Turkey, 1912.
Creation of .Albania asindependent state,i9i4.
Revolution in Mexico, 1913-14.
A.D.
1700
1720
1740
1760
1780
1800
1820
1840
i860
1880
1910
A.D.
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975 B.C. Division of the Hebrew king-
dom into Judah and Israel after the
death of Solomon.
Growth of the Hellenic States.
The age of Homer.
850 B.C. Foundation of Carthage.
Beginnings of the Latin and Etruscan
peoples.
1
Assyrian conquest of Babylon, Syria,
and Israel.
753 B.C. The foundation of Rome.
Rapid spread of the Greek Colonies.
Beginnings of the Macedonian kingdom.
Rise of Media. j
Beginnings of Japanese history. 1
Decline of Assyria, fall of Nineveh,
and establishment of new Babyl nian
Empire. 1
Cyrus, King of Persia, conquers
Media, establishes his empire over Lydia.
Assyria, and Babylonia (538 B.C.). His
son Cambyses concjuers Egypt, 525 B.C.
The Greek States revolt against Persia
and are triumphant. 1
Egypt regains independence. 1
Steady growth of Roman ascendancy
in Italy.
Struggle between Athens and Sparta.
Conquests of Alexander the Great (334-
322 B.C.). He conquers Persia , masters
Egypt, and invades India. At his death
his empire is divided ; Egypt falls under
the Ptolemies, Syria under the Seleucida;.
Babylon absorbed by Parthian Empire.
Carthage dominates Spain.
Wars between Rome and Carthage.
Overthrow of Carthage (202 B.C.)
Judea attains independence under the
Maccabees.
Growing power of Rome. Macedon a
Roman province; Egypt and Syria made
Roman protectorates. The Greek States
are absorbed into province of Macedon. 1
C.fsar conquers Gaul and lands in
Brit.iin.
Egypt becomes a Roman province.
Augustus Caesar. Establishment of the
Roin.m Empire.
75
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1 North
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apoleon.
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Z „i l-T-. 0
ntegration of the Empir
s, and rise in Asia Min
Turks, making war ag
tine Empire and the Crusa
ering Egypt.
a is invaded by Moh
n rulers, who eventually e
y at Delhi.
Kingdoms of Hungary,
oland, converted to Chris
nth century, come into i
nence.
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in Hindostan. The Re
to revolt of the Netherl
; Spain absorbs Portugal.
on of English and Scottis
followed by legislative un
jtion of Germany in tl
War. Establishment 0
les in America. Portuga
endence.
in becomes a Bourbon Vo\
bsia and Prussia. Partition
en Russia, Prussia and
er disintegration of Germ;
1 dominion in India a
ca. Independence of Unit
nee predominant under
of South American State
;nt of British India. I
lit. Egypt, Greece, an
freed from Turkey. K
rman Empire.
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77
CONTEMPORARY FIGURES IN HISTORY
TIME
B.C.
500
India China
Persia Greece
Rome
Judah
Egypt
Hacedon
TiMi-;
B.C.
liuddha ! Confucius
Darius
/Esrhylus
Tarquin the ' Haggai
500
Xerxes
Themistocles
Proud
Zethariah
450
Artaxerxes
Socrates
Plato
' Pericles
Herodotus
Thucydides
Sophocles
Nehemiah
Ezra
450
400
Euripides
400
350
Aristotle
Demosthenes
[baeus
Philip
Alexander
350
200
Hannibal
Judas Macca-
200
50
Julius Caesar
Cicero
Cleopatra
50
Jesus
Augustus
John the
Jesus
Christ
Tiberius
Horace
[ Baptist
Christ
i
Virtjil, Livy
A.D.
Britain
France
Germany
Switzerland
Rome, Italy
Seneca
Spain
Netherlands
Africa & East A.D.
1
50
Boadicea
Josephus
50
St. Paul
300
Constantine
Alhanasius
300
400
Alaric
Augustine
400
600
Chas. M artel
Mahomet
600
700
Hede
tRaschid
700
800
lioo
Alfred
Charlemagne
Hannin-al-
800
The Cid
Omar Khay-
IIOO
1200
St. Francis
yam (Persia)
1200
1300
Chaucer
William Tell
Aquinas
Dante
Tamerlane
1300
1350
Wycliffe
Froissart
Arnold von
Winkelried
Petrarch
Boccaccio
Hafiz (Persia)
1350
1450
Caxton
Da Vinci
■450
1500
Knox
Latimer
Rabelais
Luther
Copernicus
Calvin
Columbus
.Savonarola
IgnatiusLoyola
St. Theresa
Erasmus
1500
Machiaveili
Ferdnd. & Isabella
Cortez
Russia
I5SO
PhilipSidney
Montaigne
Cellini
Alva
William the
Ivan the
iSSo
Spenser
Scaliger
Tasso
[Silent
[Terrible
1600
Shakespeare
Raleigh
Bacon
Jonson
Corneille
Richelieu
Descartes
Kepler
Galileo
Cervantes
Scandinavia
Gustavus Adol-
phus
Rubens
Van Dyck
Grotius
1600
1650
Cromwell
Pascal
Peter the Gt.
1650
Milton
Racine
Leibnitz
Spinoza
[& Catherine
Bunyan
Moliere
Dryden
F^n^lon
Locke
Rochefoucauld
Hobbes
Louis XIV.
1700
Swift
Steele
Addison
Walpole
Handel
Holberg
America
1700
1750
Chatham
FredktheGi
Rousseau
Franklin
«7SO
Burke
Voltaire
(Joethe
Gessner
W.-ishington
Pitt and Fox
Lavoisier
Schiller
Pestalozzi
Wesley
Napoleon
Haydn
Burns
Mozart
Goldsmith
Kant
Sheridan
Dr. Johnson
Coleridge
Klaxmaii
Reynolds
Gainsboro'gh
Nelson
Wellington
1800
Faraday
Scott
Byron
Keats
Shelley
Wordsworth
Lamb
Hegel
Beethoven
Tegner
Thorwaldsen
1800
1825
Gladstone
Balzac
Wagner
Garibaldi
HansAndersen
Irving
1825
Macaulay
Dumas
Heine
Mazzini
Runeberg
Emerson
Oisraeli
Victor Hugo
P.ismarck
C.ivour
Wergeland
Longfellow
Landseer
Georges Sand
Moltke
Victor F.m-
Welhaven
Whittier
Mill
Lessens
P.utisen
manucl
Ibsen
Lowell
Livingstone
Napoleon 3
William I.
Bjornson
Holmes
Ruskin
Gambetia
Lincoln
Uickens
Turgenieff
Carlyle
Thackeray
Tolstoy
Browning
Tennyson
iJarwin
Hungary
Huxley
Kossuth
1000 *
1000
7^
MAKIN^K^Jp-^ffg^sEARTH
AND
OF MAN
THE BEGINNING OF THE EARTH
BY PROFESSOR SOLLAS
HTHE origin of our planet is a problem
•'■ which has appealed to the intellect
of thoughtful men from the most remote
times, and the earliest recorded specula-
tions concerning it — those of the Mosaic
cosmogony — possess a peculiar interest,
since they embody the views of the ancient
Chaldeans, who were not only systematic
observers of the heavens, but made prac-
tical use of their results.
The Mosaic cosmogony is not unworthy
of the great people among whom it took
. . its rise ; it recognises the fact
eginnmg ^^^^^ ^j^^ earth had a history an-
of a Famous , j.-.i, i . c
^. tecedent to the advent of man,
and its account of the order of
events in this history is not only remarkable
as a feat of a priori reasoning, but accords
in some respects with the results achieved
after much labour by modern science.
It was not until the middle of the
eighteenth century that the reign of
evolution began, and attempts were made
to trace the history of a planetary
system from its source in a primeval
nebula on purely mechanical grounds.
Swedenborg (1735) was the pioneer in this
direction, then came Thomas Wright (1750)
of Durham, whose work furnished inspira-
tion to Emanuel Kant (1755), and led him
to construct a consistent scheme of the
Universe. The last of this group of
cosmic philosophers is Laplace (1796),
whose admirable description of the evolu-
tion of the solar system was arrived at
independently, and without knowledge of
the previous work of Kant.
Laplace assumed as his starting-point
tlie existence of a nebula formed of in-
candescent gas, and extending beyond
the limits of the outermost planet of our
system. It was in rotation about a
central axis, and possessed in consequence
a disc-like or lenticular form. Radiating
its heat away in all directions through
surrounding space, it grew contmually
colder, and in cooling diminished in bulk.
As a consequence of this contraction its
rate of rotation increased, till at length the
centrifugal force of the outermost part
became so great that this could no longer
continue to follow the contracting mass
within, and thus remained behind as a
great rotating ring. The continued con-
traction of the internal mass, and the re-
sulting increase in the velocity of rotation,
again brought about the same condition
of things, and a fresh ring was left behind.
This process was repeated time after
time, till as many rings were formed as there
are planets in the solar system ; the central
mass which survived within the innermost
ring conden.sed to form the sun. The
rings were highly unstable — that is to
say, a slight disturbing force was sufhcient
to destroy their continuity ; they broke
across and rolled up into great nebulous
globes, which revolved round the sun in
the same direction as the original nebula,
and rotated on their axes in the same direc-
tion as that in which they re-
volved. Most of them repeated
the behaviour of the original
nebulae, leaving behind rings as
they contracted, and these rings either
rolled up to form moons or satellites, or,
in the solitary instance of Saturn's rings,
retained their annular form. The rings
are now known to consist of a multitude of
solid bodies, as proved by Clerk-Maxwell.
79
Cooling
of the
Mebula
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
By this hypothesis, so beautiful in its
simphcity, an explanation was afforded
embracing all the more important facts
of our system ; the revolution of all the
planets in nearly circular orbits and in the
same direction as that in which the sun
rotates, and the revolution of their
satellites, also in circular orbits and in
the same direction as their primaries ;
the comparatively high tem-
^ ^'"" perature and consequent low
pera ure o (jgj^j^j^y ^f ^j^g larger planets
the Earth , , J- i,'^ ^ . ,
and the sun, as well as a variety
of other phenomena, all seem to follow
naturally from it. The fundamental as-
sumption seems to be in harmony with a
number of known facts. Thus in the case
of our own planet the volcanoes distributed
around the margins of the oceans, and the
hot springs scattered irregularly over the
whole terrestrial surface, suggest that great
stores of heat exist beneath our feet, a
presumption which finds confirmation in
the fact that whenever we descend to-
wards the interior of the earth, as in
deep mines or wells, the temperature
continues steadily to rise after we have
passed a depth below which seasonal and
diurnal changes of temperature cease to be
felt, the rise being in some cases as much
as 3 deg. for loo ft., in others only i deg.
for the same distance, but on the average
I deg. for 60 ft. or 70 ft. If this increase
of temperature continues down to great
dej)ths, and there seems to be no reason
why it should not, then a jwint will be
reached, say, at thirty or forty miles down,
where the interior will attain a white heat.
Thus the earth might be regarded as a
white hot body surrounded with a film of
rock growing continually cooler towards the
surface. But such a hot body suspended
in space must be cooling, just as all bodies
which are hotter than their surroundings.
It is cooler to-day than it was yesterday,
or — what is the same thing — it was hotter
yesterday than it is to-day, and so of
all previous yesterdays. And thus as we
travel backwards in time we
perceive that the earth will be
growing hotter, the level of
white heat will be mount-
ing upwards towards the surface, and
will at last reach it, so that the earth,
instead of being, as it now is, a dark l)f)dy
shining only with the reHected light of the
sun, will be self-luminous, a tiny star of
a magnitude so diminutive as to have
awakened resentment on the part of some
80
The
Earth as
a Star
terrestrial inhabitants, who have regarded
it as disproportionate to their dignity. But
we cannot arrest imagination at this stage ;
our thought still extends its retrospective
glance into the abyss of past time, and we
perceive the earth still growing hotter,
till its temperature transcends those
limits at which it can exist in the solid
state. It becomes molten — nay, mqre, it
becomes gaseous, and thus resumes the
nebular state from which it sprang.
Precisely the same argument apj)lies
to the sun ; our mighty luminary is also
a cooling body, and if we could restore to
it the heat which it has lost in the course
of past aeons it would resume a completely
gaseous state. Modified in one way or
another, this chain of reasoning seemed
irrefragable in those happy days which pre-
ceded the discovery of radium.
The question may be considered from
another point of view. On searching the
heavens we find that many of the stages
which are assumed in Laplace's hypo-
thesis are still represented by actual
existences. There are, to begin with,
those immense diffused nebulse, almost
incapable of definition, which are proved,
on spectroscopic examination,
niverse ^^ emit that kind of light
_* , '". which is characteristic of glow-
Evolution r xi J
mg gas ; from these we pass to
others which are resolvable by the telescope
into a central and more condensed nucleus,
with two mighty nebulous arms whirled
round in a spiral, and bearing more con-
densed masses in their midst ; even ring
nebulae are known to exist ; and, finally,
there are nebulous halos which surround
some of the stars. Then we come to the
stars themselves, which are suns of various
degrees of magnitude, some immensely
larger than our own luminary, and these
are evidently in various stages of existence.
Some are blue, and afford evidence of a
higher temjierature than that of our sun ;
others are yellow, and make a nearer
approach to the solar temjierature ; while,
again, others are red, and certainly colder.
These, in conjunction with other con-
siderations, lead to the conviction that
the universe is in a state of evolution, and
that the solar system at one time existed
in a nebular state. But whether La-
))]ace's description of the series of events
through which the original nebula passed
is the true one or not is a very different
matter ; it presents so many difficulties
that scarcely any student now supports it.
Or, like the nebula of Cygrii, with the central sun well
formed and the gaseous ring far removed, the earth would
begin to shape, and the ring would roll up to form the moon.
In the beginning, it is supposed that the earth was
part of a vast nebula of gaseous matter and meteo-
rites, resembling the nebula of Argo, illustrated above.
Jupiter, which is in a molten state, wreathed in thick
vapour, with the "great red spot" indicating the begin-
ning of the solidifying process, shows what the earth
was like before it assumed its present solid condition.
Later, as the cooling process advanced, the nebula assumed
a rotatory movement in the form of a spiral. The nebula
of Andromeda affords an excellent illustration of this.
Another stage would be as in the annular nebula of Aqua- This shows the earth and the moon in their relative sizes ;
ns, the mass forming into a ball with outer ring attached. while the diagram below it illustrates the distance apart.
HOW THE HEAVENS TELL THE STORY OF THE ORIGIN OF THE EARTH
6 8l
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
A fundamental difficulty is the extreme
tenuity of the gas which is assumed
to have formed the planetary rings. A
, , second difficulty, which has
ap ace s \^QQ^ emi:)hasised by Professors
Ak J J Chamberlin and Moulton, is
Abandoned , , . j ■ ,i
to be found m the com-
paratively small amount of rotational
energy which the system at present
possesses, for this is less than oj^ of
that which, on the most favourable
assumption, must have been contained
within the original nebula. Less funda-
mental, but equally fatal, is the fact that
one of the satellites of Saturn revolves
round its primary in a direction opposed to
that of the rotation of the planet itself.
[Recently Mr. Stratton, following out a sug-
gestion of Professor W. H. Pickering, has
shown that this is quite consistent, and,
indeed, is a natural deduction from La-
place's hypothesis.] Hence for these and
other reasons we are reluctantly compelled
to abandon an hypothesis which for over
a century has exercised an influence on
oui conception of the cosmos not less
profound, penetrating, and far-reaching
than that of the famous Darwinian
doctrine of natural selection, now on
its trial.
At present, unanimity of opinion, even
on questions of the most primary kinrl,
is far to seek. Philosoi)hers are not even
agreed as to the constitution of the nebuhe.
It is questioned whether even those least
resolvable and most diffused forms which
give bright line spectra really consist of
masses of incandescent gas. Many ob-
servers, among them Sir Norman Lockyer,
now maintain that they are formed
of swarms of meteorites, which, moving
with prodigious velocity, meet in frequent
collision, and by their impact evolve
sufficient heat to become self-
^ luminous. Others, again, like
N7bulL? ^^^^' distinguished investigator
Arrhcnius, while admitting
the gaseous nature of these nebuke, deny
that they are incandescent, and assert
that their temperature is not much
above that of surrounding space. Their
exterior parts consist of the lighter
gases in a highly rarefied state, and
minute particles of negative electricity,
which are always careering through
space, on penetrating these gases ])ro-
duce a luminous discharge. A nebula
composed of swarms of meteorites would,
as Sir George Darwin has shown, behave
83
very much in the same way as one com-
posed of gas, and if in rotation would
rotate as a solid mass. The meteorites
would stand in the same relation to
the nebula as molecules to a gas, and
thus the question of the constitution
of the nebula, although of great in-
terest in itself, becomes of subsidiary
importance in tracing its subsequent
history.
One of the latest attempts to frame a
nebular hypothesis is that of Professor
J. H. Jeans. His reasoning is of a highly
mathematical character, and his con-
clusions are expressed in the most general
terms. Starting with a spherical nebula
of gas or meteorites endowed with a
small amount of rotation, he shows that
as it cools or loses energy the temperature
of the interior will not fall continuously
in precise correspondence with the cooling
of the outer parts, and this " lag" of the
interior temperature will bring about a
tendency to instability. The contraction
of the nebula due to cooling will increase
g. . the velocity of rotation, and
f th"*^ ^^^^ again will tend to insta-
p. bility. As a result of the insta-
bility so produced the nebula
will change its form, and become more
or less pear-shaped. The narrow end of
the pear will then separate from the
body and assume an indejiendent existence
as a primitive planet. This process will
recur again and again till the nebula is
resolved into a sun with its attendant
planets. The planets, existing at first
as gaseous masses or quasi-gaseous masses,
will be liable to the same kind of trans-
formation, and may thus bud off moons
or satellites.
If the nebula were not in rapid rotation,
a slight disturbing cause, acting at the
critical moment when a planet was being
ejected, might determine the inclination
of the planet's orbit, which might thus
be very oblique to the equatorial plane
of the nebula. Thus the hypothesis is not
open to one of the objections which have
been urged against that of Laplace —
namely, that the orbits of some of the
planets in the solar system are inclined
at a large angle with the plane of the
sun's equator.
Jeans mentions two disturbing causes
in particular which might easily arise —
one the penetration of the nebula by a
wandering meteorite, which might pre-
cipitate an event already on the verge
This illustrates Laplace's theory, which conceived of a vast nebula filling the whole space of the solar
system and rotating around a central axis. The outer and thinner part had much greater move-
ment than the denser central mass, finally being thrown off as a ring, which in turn rolled up into
a ball, still following the same course as the ring had followed. Thus the earth broke off from the
sun and the moon from the earth. The theory is, however, no longer credited by scientists.
The pear-shaped nebula is the theory of a young English mathematician. Professor J. H. Jeans. Starting with a
spherical nebula, he argues that in cooling it will assume the form illustrated above, and that the smaller part
will separate and form a satellite rotating independently but within a distance influenced by the parent mass.
The spiral nebula in Canes Venatici, a revolving mass of gas or meteorites, supplies, according to the nebular
hypothesis of Messrs. Chamberlin and Moulton, an excellent example of how the earth and moon were formed.
We may reasonably imagine the smaller spiral to represent the moon in the act of being thrown off by the earth.
THREE FAMOUS THEORIES OF THE BEGINNING OF THE EARTH
63
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
of happening, and simultaneously deter-
mine both the birth of a planet and thr;
obliquity of its orbit ; the second, the
presence of some distant mass, such as
a star, which, by raising a quasi-tide in
the nebula, would give the final touch
-. , required to overturn its equi-
neavenly i-i • ti • n 1
_ . . librmm. Ihe mfluence of a
^ ,,. . distant body, such as a passing
Collision , , ■{' 1 J 1
star, has been mvoked by
Moulton in another version of the nebular
hypothesis. In conjunction with Cham-
berlin, he calls special attention to the
spiral nebulae, which are by far the
commonest kind, as presenting the closest
approach to the conditions which obtain
when planets are actually in course of
formation. Chamberlin and Moulton enter
on a detailed account of the manner
in which they suppose the planets to
have grown by the gradual accretion of
meteoric masses as these encountered
each other while moving in various
elliptical orbits.
At present it would seem impossible to
speak with certainty as to the precise
history of the solar system. Meanwhile,
we may console ourselves with the closing
words of Professor Jeans' paper, to the
effect that " no difficulty need be ex-
perienced in referring existing planetary
systems to a nebulous or meteoric origin
on the. ground that the configurations of
these systems are not such as could have
originated out of a rotating mass of
liquid."
An investigation by Sir George Darwin,
which has furnished inspiration to such
hyjjotheses as that of Jeans, brings us
nearer the immediate subject of this essay,
since it treats of one of the last acts in
the great drama of planetary existence,
and attemj^ts to derive the earth and
moon from a common origin in a single
rotating sphere.
It is well known that, owing to the
M/i. .i r» frictional effects produced bv
Why the Day,, ,• , ,, . i/ • i • ■^
. _ . ' the tides the earth is being gra-
Lon er dually slowed down.as it rotates
upon its axis. Thus the day
is constantly getting longer, so that in a
few millions of years it will have increased
in length from twenty-four to twenty-five
hours. On the other hand, in jmst time
it must have been shorter than at present :
a few millions of years ago it was only
twenty-three hours in length, and many
millions of years earlier it was still less,
only some five hours or so. At that time
84
the earth was hotter than it is now, less
rigid, more yielding, and, owing to its
rapid rotation, less stable. The action on
the moon of the tides produced in it by the
earth is similar, and the rotation of the
moon has been so far diminished by them
that its day has become as long as the
month — i.e., our satellite only turns
once round on its axis in the time that it
takes to revolve once round the earth ;
it is for this reason that our satellite
keeps always the same face turned to-
wards us.
The retardation of the earth in its
rotation has, however, a very remarkable
effect on the revolution of the moon ; it
involves — by the principle of the con-
servation of moment of momentum — a
corresponding acceleration of the moon
in its orbit, and, as a consequence of this,
an enlargement of this orbit — that is,
the moon is pushed away from us, as it
were, and thus becomes more remote.
But if so, the moon must have been nearer
to us in times past. It is possible to trace
the approach of the moon to the earth
as we go backwards in time till the dis-
tance between them was only
c oon ^^^ ^^^ ^ Y^^if terrestrial radii
^ c 1. instead of the sixty radii which
Our Sphere . .t_ at ^i
now separate them. Mathe-
matics do not take us farther back than
this. But it is difficult to resist the
suggestion that in the immediately pre-
ceding stage of development the earth
and moon formed together a single
sphere.
If we may adopt this view, then we
must regard the sphere as subject to the
tidal influence of the sun. It was much
hotter, and therefore more yielding, than
the present earth ; it was also rotating
much faster, probably once in about four
or five hours. It would be contracting
as a consequence of cooling, and the
contraction would lead to instability
(gravitational instability) ; its rapid rota-
tion would also tend toward instability
(rotational instability). It is difficult to
say which of these two, gravitational or
rotational instability, would be the most
effective ; but the combined result would
be to give a pear-shaped form to the
rotating mass, and eventually to deepen
the constriction between the narrow and
the broad end, till the smaller protuberance
became comj)letely dissevered from the
larger mass, and so entered on an inde-
pendent existence as the moon. This
THE BEGINNING OF THE EARTH
final step in the process would probably
depend on the tide-producing power of the
sun ; the larger mass remained behind as
the earth, whose individual existence may
be said to date from this event.
The young earth would be subject to
very much the same conditions after as
before the ejection of the
ow c moon, and might very possibly
Moon Broke • • ? v, j
. agam pass mto a pear-shaped
^*^ form, but without proceeding
further through those subsequent changes,
which would have led to the formation
of another satellite ; and while possessing
some such form as this, she might very
well have consolidated. With advancing
years she would lose, as we have seen,
the activity of her youth, the drag of the
tides would cause her to spin ever more
slowly on her axis, till the day would
become pro-
longed to the I • . L 0 U f S
t w e n t y-four
hours of the
present. With
this dimin-
ished rate of
spin, the earth,
if free to yield.
would lose tilt
pear - shaped
form and be-
come an oblate
spheroid, and
the oblateness
of this spheroid
would con-
tinuallydimin- the shaping of the face of the earth
ish so that it Soon after the earth had cooled down, so that the oceans were formed, the would appear
' ,j . shaping of the great continents began. The action of moving water in the ,■, , ,, j-
would COntm- makingofnewlandiswelliUustratedbythevastdeltaoftheMississippi, where inat tne Qia-
Uallvanoroach *" area larger than Wales has been formed by debris deposited by the river, j-fig^gj- drawn
towards a true sphere. Suppose, however,
great continent of Africa projects like
the narrow end of a pear ; around it are
oceans — the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean,
and the Mediterranean Sea, which was
once of far greater extent ; then comes
a great dismembered ring of land, the
two Americas, the Antarctic continent,
Australia, Asia, and Europe. Within
these, on the side opposite to Africa, is
the great Pacific Ocean, which covers
over the broad end of the pear.
A line drawn from somewhere in Central
Africa to its antipodes in the Pacific,
through the centre of the earth, would
correspond to the long axis of the pear ;
a second, at right angles to this, would
correspond to its breadth ; and a third,
at right angles to both, would correspond
to the axis on which it rotates. A dia-
meter of the earth taken through the
equator is
Jkf
^
C^^fi relon
Sou nd
■•J.
\T^,
MISSISSIPPI
almost 8,000
miles in length,
the Polar dia-
meter is about
sixteen miles
shorter, and
this slight
difference
measures the
oblateness of
the spheroid,
or the depar-
ture of the
form of the
earth from a
true sphere.
Further, it
that the earth as it cooled lost its power
of readily yielding — and at present it is
more rigid than a globe of steel — then it
would pass from form to form, not by a
flowing movement, but by a series of
ruptures, and its form at any moment
might be a little in arrear of that which
it would have possessed if it had been in
the fluid state.
Thus it might indeed be possible still
to discover some trace of an old-fashioned
form in the existing planet ; and a careful
examination of the distribution of land and
sea as represented on a terrestrial globe
does, in fact, reveal a remarkable sym-
metry, in which we seem to recognise a
surviving vestige of its early state. The
by debris deposited by tne river, rnpter
through Africa is about half a mile longer
than the equatorial diameter taken at
right angles to it, and this insignificant
quantity measures the departure of the
form of the earth from that of an oblate
spheroid to that of a pear, so nearly
complete is the adjustment of its form
to existing conditions. Before
this nice adjustment was
reached, the earth must have
suffered many changes, passed
through many times of stress and storm,
and witnessed many geological revolutions.
If, at the beginning of her career, the
earth was molten, or at a very high tem-
perature, she must have been surrounded
by a very deep and dense atmosphere,
for all the waters which now rest on her
85
Earth's
Unknown
Changes
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
surface — oceans, lakes, and rivers — would
have contributed to it in the state of
steam ; and not till the temperature of
the ground had fallen to 380 deg. C. could
liquid water have begun to
r D 4^ accumulate. Then a steady
of Red-hot ^lo^npour of almost red-hot
*"^' rain would have set in, filling
up the neck of the pear and extending
far and wide over its broad end.
The temperature would now fall some-
what rapidly, and in a short space of time
the surface of the earth would have
become as cool as it is at the present day.
Directly the waters of the firmament had
collected into the oceans, leaving behind
an atmosphere like that which now
exists, geological agencies of the kind we
are now famihar with would begin their
sway. Air and rain would exert their
insidious power upon the rocks, sapping
their strength, converting the hardest
granite into soft sand and clay, which
would be washed away by the rain
through brooks and rivulets into the
channels of many rivers, all hastening
with their burden of sediment, to deposit
it finally in the sea. Here it would
accumulate, layer after layer, building up
those mighty masses of strata which now
form the greater part
of the visible land.
While this general
action was every-
where in progress,
wearing down con-
tinents and islands
towards the level of
the sea, more special-
ised activities were
assisting to the same
end.
The waves which
fall upon our coasts
are now constantly
undermining the cliffs
and extending the
margin of the sea at
the expense of the
land, and rivers not
only serve to trans-
l)ort sediment, but
cut down their chan-
nels deep into the
Action of
Winds
and Tides
rock, and so carve
out the most varied two stages in the life of the earth
1 inrkrnnpQ nf Viill nnH This illustrates in striking manner, based on the cal- f„„ rnorp widflv Hi<s
landscapes 01 mil ana culations of the best authorities, the comparative sizes of ^^^ "1"^^ WlUCiy QIS
valley from mono- theearth.first as a gaseous mass, and, second, after it had tributcd than are
When we enter into calculations we are
astonished at the rapidity with which
these agents perform their work even at
the present day ; but as we proceed
farther back into the past, when the earth
was full of youthful energy, their power
must have been greatly enhanced. We
might almost take the measure of the day
as the measure of their work, for they
probably accomplished as much during the
eight hours' day which once existed as
they do now in twenty-four hours. A
little consideration will make this clear.
It is the winds which, blowing over the
surface of the ocean, produce the sea
waves, and it is these falling on our coasts
that perform the work of marine denuda-
tion. But the winds are due in the first
place to the heat of the sun, and the
difference of temperature established at the
equator and the poles ; and, in the next
place, to the rotation of the earth. Thus,
with the increased rapidity of
rotation which we know to have
existed, and with increased
radiation from the sun, a very
probable contingency, the winds would
increase in strength and more powerfully
erode our coasts. Again, with the moon in
greater proximity, and with a more rapid
rotation of the earth,
the tides would be
much higher and
more frequent, and
these, raising and
lowering the cutting
edge of the sea, great-
ly assist it in its work
of destruction. The
winds and the tides
produce various
marine currents, and
these help to distri-
bute the sediment
which the rivers de-
liver into the sea, so
that when stronger
currents flowed as a
result of more power-
ful tides and more
violent winds, the
sediments would be
strewn over wider
areas ; hence, the
more ancient strata
of our planet are
t ono us
86
tableland.
cooled down and solidified into the planet on which we live, j-t,- ^f '[dor +im<:>
The small dot represents 8,000 miles, the earth's diameter. mOSC OI laicr lime-
THREE VIEWS OF THE GLOBE SHOWING HOW THE GREAT MOUNTAIN RANGES WERE FORMED
In the days when the earths crust had formed but was still unstable, the process of cooling not having gone far
enough, there would not be the mountains which now characterise it. These came when the earth contracted and
crumpled up along certain well defined lines, which are now represented by the three great mountain chains of the world.
Building
Up
the Earth
Finally, a heavier rainfall would result
from a more active atmospheric circulation,
creating larger rivers, and thus, at the
beginning, all those denuding agents which
are engaged in wearing the land down into
the sea would be working at a more rapid
pace. Correspondingly, all the
agents which are occupied in
building up deposits of sedi-
ments would have extended
their operations over a wider area, laying
down a foundation broad and deep.
On the other hand, the contraction of
the earth, due to the loss of its energy of
rotation as well as of its internal heat,
would also have proceeded more rapidly,
new land would have emerged from the
sea, old lands would have been submerged
beneath it far less slowly than at the
present day ; ruptures of the crust,
accompanied by earthquakes and volcanic
action, would have been more frequent ;
and thus, by the more rapid loss of its
intrinsic energy, the renovation of the
earth would have kept pace with its
accelerated destruction.
One effect of the contraction of the earth
which has manifested itself in even late
geological times is the crumpling up of the
terrestrial crust into the sharp folds of
mountain chains ; but at the beginning
this crumpling must have been far more
universal and energetic. In this connec-
tion it is interesting to observe that the
most ancient rocks known to us— the
Archaean — never present themselves under
any other form than as intensely plicated
masses. They originally consisted of lava
flows and volcanic ashes, of ancient sedi-
ments and limestones, into which subterra-
nean masses of granite and other molten,
deep-seated rocks have been injected ;
but under the intense pressures to which
they were subjected after their formation
they and the invading granite have entirely
lost their original character, and have
been metamorphosed into gneisses, schists,
and marble, all sharply and closely folded
together. In any given district the direc-
tion of their folding is maintained with
wonderful constancy over great distances.
There is no succeeding system of rocks
that has been so completely transformed,
so universally plicated, as this ancient
Archaean complex.
In later times we can pass from stratum
to stratum of the sedimentary series
and read their history almost as we turn
over the pages of a book ; in the Archaean
all are kneaded together into a state of
such desperate entanglement as to defy
the powers of human ingenuity to unravel
them. Thus the line of demarcation between
the Archaean and subsequent sedimentary
systems is the sharpest and most absolute
that is known to us in the history of the
earth. It marks the close of our planet's
infancy, the several events of which have
passed into oblivion as profound as that
of our own forgetfulness of our earliest
days. Later events, on the other hand,
are recorded in the stratified series with a
faithfulness which increases as we approach
existing times.
A history without dates must seem very
unsatisfactory to a historian, and the ques-
tion will naturally arise whether
we can assign any definite time
to the various critical events
recorded in the evolution of
the earth. At present we can only make
more or less plausible estimates. Thus,
from a consideration of the thickness of
the sedimentary crust, and the rate at
which sediments are now being deposited,
it has been asserted that the interval
87
How Wc
Know These
Wonders
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
which separates us from the close of the
Archsean era may amount to about twenty-
six millions of years. Professor Joly, basing
his argument on the undoubted fact that
the ocean derives the greater part of its salt
from the dissolved material contributed
to it by rivers, comes to the conclusion
that the ocean first came into existence
—. - about one hundred millions of
1 ne Ocean . j j.v-
fn/^ -ii- years ago. As regards the
100 million 1 • ,, r°,, (V. ^
V ,j, birth of the moon, Sir George
Years old ! tn • i - •
Darvvm has given a minimum
limit of fifty-four millions of years, but he
adds that it may have taken place many
hundreds of millions of years before this.
Lord Kelvin has attempted to determine
the time which has elapsed since the earth
first acquired a solid crust. If we only knew
the rate at which the earth is cooling we
might calculate back to this time with
some assurance of certainty, always, how-
ever, on the assumption that the earth is
simply a hot body cooling like any other
hot body — such, say, as a red-hot cannon-
ball. But a few years ago it began to be
seriously suspected that this assumption
was a very doubtful one, for a new ele-
ment— radium — was discovered in 1898,
which possesses the remarkable property
of spontaneously liberating heat, and this
not in small quantities, but at an aston-
ishing rate. One gramme of radium, for
example, gives out enough heat in one hour
to raise the temperature of one gramme of
water to boiling point ; hour after hour,
year in, year out, this wonderful substance
is setting free the energy it contains, and
will continue to do so until, some thou-
sands of years hence, it has exhausted its
store. If this element should happen to
exist in sufficient quantity within the
earth, then the earth could not be said
to be cooling just like a piece of hot iron,
and the increase of temperature we experi-
ence as we descend towards the interior
of the earth might possibly be due to the
heat set free from radium. Indeed, the
Th P argument is not confined to
P '' the earth ; it may apply also to
. the sun, and much of the heat
'"*''***' vve derive from that luminary
mav be provided by bursting atoms of
radium. This was pointed out by Sir
George Darwin and Professor Joly in 1903.
It became obviously a question of the
first importance to discover what propor-
tion of the earth's crust consists of radium,
and an investigation was undertaken for
this purpose by the Hon, R. J. Strutt,
who finds that the rocks composing the
earth's crust contain a superabundance
of radium — ^sufficient, if this element is
uniformly distributed through the whole
earth in the same proportion as it occurs
at the surface, not only to make good the
heat which is radiated away into space,
but actually to raise the temperature of
our planet, which, on this evidence, should,
therefore, be growing not colder, but hotter.
This is a result as disconcerting at first
sight as it is astonishing, and its effects
are very wide-reaching. Of course, it com-
pletely destroys the validity of Lord
Kelvin's argument, but it also deprives
the nebular hypothesis of one of its cher-
ished lines of evidence — a loss which the
force of the general argument enables us
to bear with equanimit}^
In any case, the vast body of facts
bearing on the history of the earth suffices
to show that' its temperature cannot be
rising. Mr. Strutt has, therefore, imagined
that the radium is not uniformly distri-
buted throughout the mass of the planet,
and supposes that it is restricted to an ex-
ternal zone forty-five miles in
„" ^ thickness ; this would suffice
veo grea ^^ maintain the earth at its
existing temperature. If, how-
ever, we admit a restriction of this kind, we
are in no way bound to fix the limit at forty-
five miles. All we can say is that we do
not know how far downwards the radium
reaches — for aught we know five miles, or
even less, is as likely a limit as forty-five
miles. Professor Joly, indeed, maintains
that the radium we meet with is not proper
to the earth at all, but comes from the sun.
Radium is a short-lived element, its
existence being hmited to a few thousand
years ; but as fast as it decays it is repro-
duced at the expense of another element —
uranium — the lifetime of which is measured
by hundreds of millions of years.
The last quarter of a century has proved
fertile in great discovcries^more so than
any corresponding ])eriod in the past. As
a result, the whole world of scientific
thought has been thrown into commo-
tion ; old-established theories, and even
the most fundamental notions, seem to be
in a state of flux. Under the stimulus of
new ideas great questions, such as the
constitution of matter, the origin of
species, and the birth of worlds are being
re-investigated with renewed energy, and
we seem to be on the eve of great ev^ents.
William Johnson Sollas
FOUR PERIODS OF THE EARTH'S DEVELOPAENT
A Postscript to Professor Sollas's Chapter on the Wonderful
Story of the World's Birth, beginning on page 79
■yHE earth was once " a fluid haze of light."
The whole solar system once formed a
vast nebula, consisting of glowing gas, or
a swarm of meteoroids. Our planet was
slowly shaped into a globe out of this primi-
tive nebula.
This globe was at first intensely hot,
and probably liquid. A solid crust formed
on the surface as heat was lost by radiation,
and this crust consisted of the oldest rocks
of igneous formation like the granites and
gneisses. During this Archaean or Eozoic
Period, the earth acquired its atmosphere
and its oceans, and it is probable that the
mysterious origin of life took place.
The later history of the earth since the
stratified rocks began to appear, and life
existed, is divided into four main periods,
of which the first is known as Primary, or
Palaeozoic.
The First Period of the Earth
Cambrian System. The rocks formed in
the Cambrian Age are mainly grits, quartz-
ites, and conglomerates, with shales, schists,
and limestones. The earth was then mostly
covered by seas, and the first well-defined
forms of life were of marine origin.
Silurian System. The Silurian rocks
are mostly sandstones, shales, and slates
deposited in the seas. The first vertebrates
made their appearance as fishes, whilst
insects began to flutter in the air, and
occasionally to alight on the emerging land.
Devonian System. This was the age of
the old red sandstone. Fishes reached a
high state of development, whilst the first
traces appeared of land vegetation, ferns and
lycopods.
Carboniferous System. This system
is exceptionally important, because its chief
rock is coal, the fossilised remains of the
luxuriant vegetation which grew in tropical
swamps. The first terrestrial animals, true
air breathers, now appeared.
Permian System. The last of the primary
systems gave us the new red sandstone, dis-
tinguished from the old by lying above the
coal measures. The Permian Age was appa-
rently unfavourable to life, and is only
notable for the first appearance of the land
reptiles into which the amphibians developed.
The Second Period of the Earth
The Secondary Period marks the emer-
gence of the dry land into importance greater
than that of the sea.
Triassic System. The Triassic rocks
chiefly consist of sandstones and hardened
clays laid down in shallow sea basins. Land
vegetation now first began to assume a
modern type, with conifers and cycads. The
seas were still richly peopled, and the land first
gave a home to huge reptiles, or dinosaurs.
Jurassic System. This system is marked
by a great variety of limestones, the product
of dead sea creatures. It is essentially the
age of reptiles. The ichthyosaurus disputed
the seas with the plcsiosaurus ; the pterodactyl
ruled the air ; whilst on land, huge monsters
like the brontosaur and diplodocus browsed
on tropical vegetation. From these reptiles
the birds were developing, whilst small mar-
supials, the oldest of the great mammalian
race, skipped under the branches.
Cretaceous System. This was the age of
the great chalk deposits. The birds, now
emerging from their reptilian ancestry,
dominated its life, and the first modern
plants appeared on the land.
The Third Period of the Earth
The Tertiary Period marks the true begin-
ning of modern geological history, when the
great outlines of geography were laid down,
and the first representatives of modern plants
and animals made their appearance.
Eocene System. The Eocene rocks are
mainly limestones, with sandstone and
hardened clays. We owe them to the sea and
its organisms. Modern evergreen trees now
first appeared. The mammals come to the
front, with the tapir-like palaeotherium and
the first recognisable ancestor of the horse.
Miocene System. The Miocene Age
was a mountain-building period, when the
great chain which runs from the Alps into
Central Asia received its final uplift.
Deciduous trees, like the beech and elm, now
made their appearance. The giant masto-
don and the formidable sabre-toothed tiger
roamed the Miocene forest, and true apes —
man's first forerunners — mopped and mowed
in the boughs.
Pliocene System. The last of the
Tertiary ages set the final stamp on the
geological moulding of the earth's crust.
Its plants were transitional to the flora of
modern Europe. Great herds of herbivora
now appeared.
The Fourth Period of the Earth
The Quaternary Period is that in which we
are still living. Its outstanding feature is
the appearance of man.
Pleistocene or Glacial System. Its
essential feature was the appearance of
glacial conditions over most of the northern
hemisphere, when great ice sheets rubbed
our land into shape. The vegetation was
Arctic, and only animals like the reindeer and
the hairy mammoth could endure the cold.
Human or Recent System. The pre-
cise antiquity of man is still uncertain, but
it was only after the close of the Glacial
Period that he made his home in Europe,
where he shared a precarious existence with
mammoth, cave-bear, and rhinoceros. Man
developed through the Palceolithic and Neo-
lithic ages of stone implements to the Bronze
and Iron ages, when metal was first worked.
In the last of these we live.
89
GEOLOGICAL CLOCK OF THE WORLD'S LIFE
This page is an effort, based on Professor Lester Ward's calculations in "Pure Sociology," to show the
comparative length of each geological period, and the thin white line between Tertiary and Archaean indicates
the period of human history. Thin as this line is— and we could not show it thinner — it is too thick, and out oi
proportion to the rest of the clock. If we assume that from the beginning of the world — from its first forming
into a solid sphere — to the present, time may be represented by a day of twenty-four hours, the time occupied
by human history does not exceed twelve seconds. This is reckoning human history as ten thousand years.
There is, of course, no possibility of obtaining more than relative figures for such a scheme as this, which
should be regarded in connection with the previous page and the chart of the Beginnings of Life, facing page 96
The thin white line between the Tertiary and the Archaean periods represents the duration ot linnian history
TABLE SHOWING PROPORTIONS OF YEARS AND HOURS
Geological Periods
Archaean
Laurentian . .
Cambrian
Silurian
Devonian
Carboniferous
Triassic
Jurassic
Cretaceous . .
Tertiary and Quaternary
111.
th.t
vhl.Jl
Years
18,000,000
18,000,000
6,000,000
6,000,000
6,000,000
6,000,000
3,000,000
3,000,000
3,000,000
3,000,000
72,000,000 = 24
TERTIARY AND
QUATERNARY PERIODS |
At a rough gr"ess, three million years may be
allowed for the Tertiary and Quaternary periods
Geological Periods
j Years
Hrs.
Min.
Sec.
Tertiary
Pleistocene
Human
Total .. ..
2,600,000
300,000
100,000
-
52
6
2
-
3,000,000
I
-
-
Human History
10,000 = = 12
qo
HOW LIFE BECAME POSSIBLE
ON THE EARTH
BY DR. ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
pARLY writers on the relation of man
*--' and animated nature to the material
universe not only assumed that the latter
existed for the former, but that both alike
were the results of special acts of creation.
Furthermore, they usually took it for
granted that all things were created very
much in the condition in which we now
see them, and that any changes that have
since taken place are but slight superficial
modifications of a permanent and un-
changing whole. Not only were the sun
and moon and stars created as appanages
of the earth, but the earth itself in all its
details of sea and land, hills and valleys,
mountains and precipices, swamps and
deserts, was made and fashioned just as
we now see it, and every feature of its
surface was supposed to have some
j)urpose in connection with man.
These purposes we could, in some cases,
understand, while in others they seemed
Th OIH wholly unintelligible, and much
J . J ingenuity was bestowed by the
Q . natural theologian and others
to explain more and more of
the observed facts from this point of view.
The same opinions prevailed in regard to
the infinite variety of animals and plants,
each individual species being supposed to
have been an independent creation, and
all to have some definite and preordained
purjiose in relation to mankind.
These views, however absurd they seem
to most people now, were almost univer-
sally held so recently as during the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, and were
thus coincident with one of the most
brilliant ej^ochs of our literature and our
dawning science It was only towards
the beginning of the nineteenth century,
when geology became widely studied and
its results were fully appreciated, that the
more rational conception of a very slow
development of the earth's surface during
countless ages began to be generally
accepted.
The grand nebular hypothesis of Laplace
came to reinforce the views of the geolo-
gists, by showing how the earth itself may
have . originated as a gaseous or molten
g'obe ; and its slow process of cooling, with
the reaction of the interior and exterior
on each other, served to elucidate the facts
of the heated interior, as shown by hot
springs and volcanoes, as well as many of
the phenomena presented by the distorted
Changing ^"^ ^ metamorphosed strata
Conditions ^^^'^^ ^^^^^d its crust. Hence it
of the Earth f>'^''ifi"ally came to be perceived
that the condit on of the earth,
with all its endless variations of surface,
of continents and oceans, of seas and
islands, of vast plateaux and lofty
mountain ranges and extensive low and
plains, with their ravines and cataracts,
their great lakes and stately rivers, was
subject to perpetual change, f om that
remote epoch when it seems to have
been actually the case that " the earth
was without form and void," and that
owing to the greater density of the vapour-
laden atmosphere, " darkness was upon
the face of the deep."
Another field of geological research
forced us to the conclusion that the same
continued process of change had affected
the forms of life upon the earth. When
carefully investigated, the crust was found
to abound in the fossilised remains of
animals and ])lants. Careful study of
these showed that the oldest of all were
of comparatively simple structure, . nd
that the higher forms only appeared in
more recent epochs ; while the highest of
all were probably very little older than
Changing ^^^^ ^'^''^^- ^ [* /^ only
Forms durmg the last half century
of Life *^^^ *^^ theory of Evolution
has been elaborated and has
become generally accepted as applicable
to the whole of the vast cosmic process
--from the development of the nebu'.T
into stars and suns and systems, with
a corresponding development of planets
from an early condition of intense heat,
through a more or less lengthy period
of cooling and contraction, to an ultimate
91
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
state of refrigeration, the earlier and later
stages being alike unsuited to the existence
of hfe.
More important still, the discovery of
the theory of Natural Selection by Darwin
— and at a later period by myself — has
led to a satisfactory explanation of the
successive appearance of higher and more
complex forms of life, and also
eory o ^^ ^^^^^ wonderfully minute and
Natural , j l, ,■ r
c , .. complex adaptation of every
Selection r , ./ ... J^
species to its conditions of
existence, and to its organic as wel' as
its inorganic environment, which all other
theories — even the most recent — have
failed to gra])j:)le with.
The logical completeness as well as the
extreme simi:)licity of this explanation of
organic evolution has led great numbers
of thoughtful but ill-informed persons to
reject it, because it seems to render un-
necessary the existence of a primary
intelligent cause ; while another equally
large but, as I think, equally ill-informed
class — the so-called monists — use it to
demonstrate the non-existence, or, at all
events, the needlessness, of any such cause.
Both alike err, because they fail to take
cognisance of the fact that every form of
evolution, and pre-eminently that of the
organic world, is an explanation of a
process of change, a law of development,
not in any sense or by any possibility an
explanation of fundamental laws, causes,
or origins. It presupposes the existence
not only of matter — itself a thing whose
nature is becoming more and more
mysterious and unthinkable with the
advance of physical science — but of all
the vast comi)lex of laws and forces
which act upon it — mechanical, physical,
chemical, and electrical laws and forces —
al more or less dependent on the still more
mysterious, all-pervading ether. Thus, the
universe n its purely physical and in-
organic aspect is now seen to be such an
overwhelmingly complex organism as to
„, . , , suggest to most minds some
Wonderful "^
Complexity of
vast ntelligent power per-
the Universe ^'^[^"g ^"-J sustaining it.
Persons to whom this seems
a logical necessity will not be much disturbed
by the dilemma of the agnostics — that, how-
ever wonderful the material universe may
be, a being who could bring it into existence
must be more wonderful, and that they
prefer to hold the lesser marvel to be self-
existent rather than the greater. When,
however, we pass from the inorganic to
92
the organic world, governed by a new set
of laws, and apparently by some regulating
and controlling forces altogether distinct
from those at work in inorganic nature ;
and when, further, we see that these organ-
isms originated at some definite epoch
when the earth had become adapted to
sustain them, and thereafter developed
into two great branches of non-sentient
and sentient life, the latter gradually
acquiring higher and higher senses and
faculties till it culminated in man— ^a
being whose higher intellectual and moral
nature seems adapted for, even to call
for, indefinite development — this logical
necessity for some higher intelligence to
which he himself owes his existence, and
which alone rendered the origin of sentient
life possible, will seem still more irre-
sistible.
The preceding remarks arc intended to
suggest that the theory of evolution,
combined with the quite recent and very
startling advances in physical science, so
far from making the universe around us
more intelligible as a self-sustaining and
self-existent whole, has really rendered it
less so, by showing that it is
n 'f . J .t infinitely more complex than
Behind the 1 j <■ 1 j
^ we had formerly supposed ;
and further, that matter itself,
instead of being, as was once believed, a
comparatively simple thing, eternal and
indestructible, is in all its various forms sub-
ject to decay and disintegration. We now
see that the only thing known to us that we
can conceive as having unending existence
is mind itself ; and, just as Darwin's theory
of Natural Selection has opened up to us
an infinite field of study and admiration
in the forms and colours and mutual
relations of the various species of animals
and plants, so does modern science open
up to us new and unfathomable depths in
the inner structure of matter and of the
cosmos, and thus compels us more and
more to recognise a mental rather than
a mere physical substratum to account
for its existence.
There is, however, another set of rela-
tions which have been hitherto very little
studied — those between the organic and
the inorganic worlds in their broader
asjjects. These are now found to be
very much more complex and more
remarkable than is usually supj^o.scd,
and they also have an important bearing
upon the great problem of the origin
and destiny of man This is a subject
HOW LIFE BECAME POSSIBLE ON THE EARTH
which opens up a variety of considera-
tions of extreme interest, showing that
the exact adaptations of our earth —
and presumably of any other planets—to
enable it to sustain organic life, from its
first appearance and through its long
course of development, is as varied and
complex and as much beyond the pos-
sibihties of chance coincidences as are
any of the individual adaptations of
animals and plants to their immediate
environment. Most of these latter adap-
tations have been made known to us by
Darwin and his followers, and they have
excited the admiration and astonishment
of all lovers of Nature. When the ante-
cedent and grander relations of planet to
hfe are studied with equal care, these also
will, I believe, excite deeper admiration,
still' more profound astonishment, be-
cause any secondary laws that could have
brought them about are less easy to dis-
cover, or even to imagine.
Before we can form any adequate
idea of the nature of a world which shall
be able to support and develop organic
life, we must consider what are the special
conditions that alone render
such hfe possible. We, of
Essential
Conditions
of Life
course, refer to the whole of
the organic world, from the
lowest to the highest, not to the few
exceptional cases in which life may be
possible under conditions that would be
fatal to the higher as well as to most of
the lower forms.
The one striking speciahty of the higher
animals— and to a less degree of the
higher i)lants — is that of continuous, all-
})ervading motion, every portion of their
substance being in a state of flux : each
particle itself moving, growing, living and
dying, and being replaced by other
particles of the same nature and fulfilling
the same functions. To keep up this
growth, and to enable every part of the
structure to be continually renewed, food
is required. This is taken into the
stomach of animals in the solid or liquid
form, is then decomposed and recomposed,
that which is useless or superfluous being
thrown off by the intestines, while what
is needed for growth is transformed
into blood and by a wonderfully intricate
system of branching tubes is carried to
every part of the body, furnishing nourish-
ment and repair alike to bone and muscle,
to all the internal organs and all the out-
ward integuments, and to that marvel-
lously complex nervous system which
also permeates every part of the body
and is essential to the higher mani-
festations of life— to the exertion of
force, voluntary motion, and, apparently,
to thought itself. Add to this the constant
influx of air, which at once purifies the
blood and supplies animal heat, and is so
important that its cessation
The Miracle ^^^ ^ ^^^ minutes is usually
?5 , .- fatal, and we have a machine
Human Life ^^ complex in its structure and
mode of action that the most elaborate
of human machines is but as a grain of
sand to a world in comparison.
Now the very possibil.ty of such a
material organism as this depends upon
a highly complex form of matter termed
protoplasm, which is at once extremely
plastic and of extreme instability, and is
yet capable of secreting or building up its
atoms into such solid and apparently
durable forms as bone, horn, and hair,
besides the various liquids and semi-
solids which buid up the organism.
This fundamental organic substance con-
sists of only four chemical elements —
nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon,
and almost all animal and vegetable
structures and products have the same
elemental constitution, though with such
widely different characteristics. Four
other elements — sulphur, hme, silicon, and
phosphorus — also occur in small quantities
in organic tissues, to supply special needs ;
but these are not essential to all forms of
life, and are only taken up and utilised by
the living protoplasm when required.
Protoplasm is undoubtedly the basis of
physical hfe, yet it only exists in, and is
produced by, living organisms. The
moment such an organism dies, disorgan-
isation and decay set in, and the whole
mass becomes gradually changed into
more stable compounds, or into its con-
stituent elements. It appears, therefore,
that some agency— usually termed "vital
force " — must be at work,
®*^'* first to produce this wonderful
of Physical compound, then to form ,t
into " cells "—the physiological
units of all organisms — and afterwards
to direct the energies supplied by heat
and light so as to build up the exces-
sively complex structures, with all
their wonderful powers and potentiahties,
which we term animals and plants. All
this seems to imply not "a force " only,
but very many forces, all of which must
93
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
hav^e some kind of mind in or behind them,
to direct these forces to such infinitely
varied yet perfectly defined ends.
Consider for a moment one of the
simplest of these cases. Let us take the
minute seed of one of the great tropical
fig-trees, and another seed of a strawberry,
or of garden cress. Both will be about the
same size and shape, and the
"""^^ most acute microscopist would
° jj not find any difference in the
very ay -j^^gj-j^^j Structure that could
intelligibly account for the different results
when these httle grains of protoplasm are
exposed to identical conditions. For,
even if planted near each other, and
exposed to the same amount of heat and
moisture, to the very same atmosphere,
and the same kind of water, as well as
identically the same soil, yet invariably
the one will grow into a large tree, the
other into a small herb, and in the course
of time, still with no change whatever of
the physical conditions to which both are
exposed, each will produce its peculiar
foliage, and flowers, and fruit, very
different in all their characters from those
of the other. Were this result not so
common as to seem to us " natural," we
should call it a miracle ; and it is really
and essentially as inexplicable as many
things which are termed miracles only
because they are unfamiliar and
inexplicable.
Now, this wonderful substance, the phy-
sical base of all life — and as it is the only
base that exists, or has ever existed,
on the earth, we may fairly assume that
no other is possible — can only maintain
itself and perform its functions under
certain very definite conditions, which con-
ditions are now maintained on our earth's
surface, and must have been maintained
throughout the long geological periods
during which life has been slowly develop-
ing What these conditions are we will
now proceed to show.
The first essential for organic
life is a certain very limited
range of temperature. We are
so accustomed to consider the
change of temperature from winter to
summer, from day to night, and that
which occurs when we pass from the
tropics to the Polar regions as being very
great, that we do not realise what a small
proportion such changes bear to the whole
range of temperature that exists in the
known universe. The absolute zero of
94
The First
Essential
for Life
temperature is calculated to be minus
461° F., while the heat of the sun has been
determined to be over 10,000° F., and many
of the stars are known to be much hotter
than the sun. The actual range of tem-
perature is therefore enormous ; but any
development of organic life is possible
only within the very narrow limits of the
freezing and boiling points of water, since
within those temperatures only is the
existence of liquid water possible. But
a much less range than this is really re-
quired, because albumen, one of the com-
monest forms of protoplasm, is coagulated
or solidified at a temperature of about
160° F. Now, if, as is generally believed,
the earth has been once a liquid or even
a gaseous mass and has since cooled to its
present temperature on the surface, and
the sun is undergoing a similar process of
cooling, we are able to understand that
the very limited range of temperature
within which life development is possible
implies an equally limited period of time
as compared with that occupied by
the whole process of solar and plane-
tary development.
It must be imderstood, how-
th^H*^t ^ ^^^'^' ^^^^ ^^^ present tempera-
f^th ^s ^"^^ °^ *^® earth's surface s
due entirely to sun-heat, and
that if that were withdrawn or greatly
diminished the whole surface of the globe
would be permanently far below the freez-
ing point and all the oceans be frozen
for a considerable depth ; so that aU
organic life would become extinct. Under
such conditions no renewed develo{)ment
of life would be possible ; and it is therefore
quite certain that the sun has actually
maintained the uniform moderate tem-
perature required, and must continue
to maintain it for whatever future period
man is destined to continue his existence
upon the earth.
But it is not only a certain amount of
heat that is required, but also a sufficient
quantity of light ; and this implies a further
restriction of conditions, because light
is due to vibrations of a limited range of
wave-length, and without these particular
rays plants cannot take the carbon from
the carbonic acid in the atmosphere, and
by its means build up the wonderful series
of carbon compounds, including proto-
plasm, which are essential for the life
of animals. What is commonly termed
dark heat, therefore, would not be suffi-
cient for the development of any but the
HOW LIFE BECAME POSSIBLE ON THE EARTH
lowest forms of life, even though it pro-
duced the necessary temperature during
a sufficient period of time.
All organisms, from the lowest to the
highest, whether plant or animal, consist
very largely of water, and its constant pre-
sence either in the liquid or gaseous form
is essential for organic life. On our earth
oceans and seas occupy the greater
part of the surface, while their average
de{)th is so great that the quantity of
water is sufficient to cover the whole
of the globe free from inequalities two
miles deep. It is this enormous amount
of water that supplies the air with ample
moisture, such as renders the life of
the tropics so luxuriant. Yet even now
the inequality of water-supply is such
that large areas in all parts of the
earth are what we term deserts, only
supporting a very few iorms of life that
have become specially adapted to them,
and certainly unfitted for the continuous
development of life from lower to higher
forms.
Water is also of immense importance as
an equaliser of temperature, the currents
of the ocean conveying the
warmth of the tropics to ameli-
Water and
the
Atmosphere
orate the severity of temperate
and Polar regions, while the
amount of water- vapour in the atmosphere
acts as a retainer of heat during the night,
without which it is probable that the sur-
face of the earth would freeze every night
even in the tropics. When we consider
that water consists of two gases — oxygen
and hydrogen — in definite proportions, and
that without their presence m these pro-
portions and in the necessary quantity
the development of organic life would
have been impossible, we find that we have
here a remarkable and very complex set of
conditions which must be fulfilled in any
planet to enable it to develop life.
But this is not all. The atmosphere
is so intimately associated with water in
its life-relations, and is itself so absolutely
essential to the existence from moment to
moment of the higher animals, that the
two require to be duly proportioned to
each other and to the globe of which they
form a part.
In the first place the atmosphere must
be of a sufficient density, this being needed
in order that it may be an adequate storer
up of solar heat, and also in order that it
may be able to supply sufficient oxygen,
water-vapour, and carbonic-acid gas for
the requirements of both vegetable and
animal life. We have a striking example
of the use of air as a storcr-up and dis-
tributor of heat and moisture in the
very different character of our south-west
and north-east winds. The effect of the
density of the air is equally well shown
when we ascend lofty mountains where we
find perpetual snow and
ProTects* ^^^' ^"^ ^^"^P^y *° *^^ ^^^^
e' thV N' ht ^^^^ *^^ ^^^ ^^ ^'^^ dense
^ enough to retain the heat
of the sun — which is actually greater than
at low levels — so that at night the tem-
perature regularly falls below the freezing
point. On the other hand a very much
denser atmosphere would absorb so much
water vapour as probably to shut out
the light of the sun, and thus have a
prejudicial effect on vegetable life.
Again, there is good reason to believe
that the proportions of the various gases
in the atmosphere are, within certain
narrow limits, such as are most favourable
not only for the life that actually exists,
but for any life that could be developed
from the elements that constitute the uni-
verse. Oxygen has properties which seem
absolutely essential to organic life ; but
nitrogen, though only serving to dilute
the oxygen so far as the higher animals
are directly concerned, is yet indirectly
essential lor them, since it is in vege-
tables a constituent of that protoplasm
which is the very substance of their bodies.
Now, i^ilants obtain their nitrogen mainly
from the minute proportion of ammonia
that exists in the atmosphere, and this
ammonia is formed by the union of the
nitrogen of the air with the hydrogen of the
water-vapour under the influence of elec-
tric discharges — that is, of thunderstorms.
It is evident, then, that the required
amount of this essential compound will
depend upon a due adjustment of the
quantities of nitrogen and aqueous vapour
always present ; while the electric dis-
charges seem to be due to the
friction of various strata of air
with each other and with the
earth's surface, due to the winds
and storms ; and winds are due to highl}^
complex causes, involving the rate of the
earth's rotation, the rise and fall of the tide,
the density of the atmosphere, the quan-
tity of its aqueous vapour, and the amount
of solar heat which it receives. Unless
all these very diverse factors existed in
their due proportion, some of the results
95
Use of
Thunder
storms
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
might be highly prejudicial if not quite
inimical to the development of life. To
these various adaptations of our gaseous
envelope we must add one other. Carbonic
acid gas in the atmosphere is absolutely
essential to vegetable life, while it is
directly antagonistic to that of the higher
animals. Its quantity must, therefore, be
strictly proportionate to the
,t °** ^' needs of both ; and that benefi-
. cial proportion must have been
™ ^'^ *" preserved throughout the whole
period of the existence of the higher air-
breathing animals.
These various considerations show us
that our atmosphere, consisting as it does
mainly of two common gases mixed
together, and therefore seeming to most
people one of the simplest things possible,
is really awonderfullycomplex arrangement
which is adapted to serve the purposes
of living organisms in a great variety of
ways. But this by no means exhausts the
subject of its adaptation to support and
develop organic life, because its very
existence on the earth in a suitable quan-
tity and composed of the essential ele-
ments can be shown to depend on other
and deeper relations which will now be
pointed out.
The older writers on the subject of the
habitability of the planets took no account
whatever of the importance of size, dis-
tance from the sun, period of rotation,
and obliquity of the ecliptic as determining
the possiliility of organic life, but simply
assumed that, because the earth possessed
an abundant life-development, all the other
planets must also possess it. But we know
that the above-mentioned factors are of
very high importance, as we will proceed
briefly to j^oint out.
It is now believed that the amount of-
atmosphere possessed by a planet is due
mainly, perhaps entirely, to the planet's
mass, and its consequent gravitative power.
Spectrum-analysis has shown that vast
-, ... masses of gaseous matter exist
Earth s • ,, ." 1 •- •
„ , m the universe, and it is pro-
of Gas hable that, in a state of
extreme tenuity, these are
very widely diffused. Just as meteoric
dust is constantly attracted to the earth,
and periodically in larger quantities, so
are gases, and supposing the aggrega-
tions of free gaseous matter to have been
distributed with some approach to uni-
formity, then, as planets grew in size,
they would also tend to secure a larger
96
amount of the diffused gases, thus forming
deeper atmospheres. The observed facts
agree with this view. The largest planets,
Jupiter and Saturn, have such a depth
of atmosphere as permanently to obscure
any solid interior they may possess. The
only planet closely approaching the earth
in size and density — Venus — has an atmo-
sphere which appears to be loftier than
ours, but it may be composed of different
gases. Mars, which has only one-ninth
the mass of the earth, has a lofty but
very tenuous atmosphere, and probably
no water, the Polar snows being due pro-
bably to the freezing of some dense gas.
The climate and physical condition of
Mars is, however, still a subject of much
controversy, which I hope to discuss in a
separate work dealing with the arguments
of Professor Lowell [see page 105J. In that
volume the reader will find, fully set forth
my reasons, on scientific grounds, against
the supposed habitability of Mars.
But, besides attracting cosmic masses
of gaseous matter to form its atmosphere,
there is another equally important func-
tion of the mass of a planet — its selective
'.'I. r *!. power on the kind of gases it
The Earth , i j • •
_, , , . can permanently retain in a
Selects and c . , 'ri 1 1 c
., _ tree state, ihe molecules ot
Uses Oas ,.. ■ , j
gases are in a condition ot rapid
motion in all directions, which explains
the elastic force they exhibit. The speed
of this motion has been determined for
all the chief gases, and also the gravitative
force necessary to prevent them from
continually escaping into space from the
upper limit of the atmosphere. Thus the
moon, which has a mass only one-eightieth
that of the earth, can retain no free gas
whatever on its surface. Mars can retain
only the very heavy gases, but neither
hydrogen nor water-vapour. The earth,
however, has force enough to retain all
the gases except hydrogen, which is just
beyond its limit ; and this may explain
why it is that there is no free hydrogen in
the atmosphere, although this gas is con-
tinually ])roduced in small quantities by
submarine volcanoes, is emitted some-
times from fissures in volcanic regions,
and is a jiroduct of decaying vegetation.
Once united with oxygen to form water,
it becomes amenable to gravity in the
form of invisible aqueous vapour, and is
thenceforth a permanent possession for
us in its most valuable form.
The very accurate adjustments that
render our earth suitable for the production
HOW LIFE BECAME POSSIBLE ON THE EARTH
and long-continued development of
organic life, culminating in man, may be
well shown by another consideration. If
our earth had been 9,600 miles instead of
8,000 miles in diameter — a very small
increase in view of the immense range of
planetary magnitudes from Mercury to
Jupiter — with a slight proportionate in-
crease in density, due to its greater force
of gravitative compression, its mass would
have been about double what it is now.
This would probably have led to its having
attracted and retained double the amount
of gases, in which case the water produced
would have been double what it is —
perhaps even more, because hydrogen gas
would not then escape into space as it
does now. But the surface of the globe
would have been only one-half greater
than at present ; so that, unless the ocean
cavities were twice as deep as they actually
are, the whole surface of the earth — except,
perhaps, a few tops of submarine vol-
canoes— would have been covered several
miles deep in water, and all terrestrial
life would have been impossible.
From the various considerations here
Th D ^^^ forth it appears clear to me
. , . that no other planet of the solar
Atmosphere , , ^ ,
of Venus system makes any approach to
the conditions essential for the
development of a rich and varied organic
life such as adorns our earth. One only
— Venus — has a sufficient bulk and density
to give it the needful atmosphere ; but as
it receives about twice as much solar heat
as does the earth, it is probable that its
very deep atmosphere may be mainly due
to the fact that a large proportion of its
water is held in a state of vapour, 'ts
seas and oceans being proportionately
reduced in extent. Judging from what
happens on the earth, this would probably
lead to an excessive area of deserts, and
thus be inimical to hfe. But this planet
appears to possess one feature which
renders it fundamentally unsuitable for
organic life.
Several modern observers have found
that the older astronomers were all in error
in giving Venus a rotation-period almost
exactly the same as ours, an error due to
the indefinite and variable markings of its
surface. They have now deduced a period
about equal to that of its revolution round
the sun — a rate whi^h has been confirmed
by spectrum-analysis, and further con-
firmed by the fact that this planet has no
measurable polar compression. As during
transits of Venus over the sun's disc the
conditions for the accurate measurement
of the compression, if any exist, are
the best possible, and as none has been
found, this alone affords a demonstration
that the rate of rotation must be very s ow,
because the laws of motion necessitate a
-J.. ,. definite amount of equatorial
Why there , , ^ ,. ,
, .- protuberance correspondmg to
IS no Liifc ii , , TT ir ^r 7
on Venus ^^^^' "-^^^ ^^® surface
has, therefore, perpetual day
and the other half perpetual night, lead-
ing to violent contrasts of heat and cold
for the two hemispheres with, in all pro-
bability, correspondingly violent winds,
rains, and electrical disturbances — con-
ditions so entirely opposed to the uni-
formity of temperatures and stability of
meteorological phenomena during long
geological epochs which are essential for
the full development of organic life, that
such development is perhaps less probable
on this planet than on any other.
I think I have now shown not only that
no other planet in the solar system makes
any approach to the possession of the
varied and complex adaptations which
are essential for a full development of
organic lite, but also that on the Earth
itself the conditions are so numerous and
so nicely balanced that very moderate
deviations in excess or defect of what
actually exists in the case of any one
of them — and of others not referred to
here — might have rendered it equally
unsuitable, so that either no organic life
at all, or only a very low type of life, could
have been developed or supported.
If, then, the more superficial indications
of design in the relations of animals to
their environment, and of man to the uni-
verse, have been shown by modern science
to have required no special interference of
a higher power to bring them about, but
that they have been due to natural laws
acting in accordance with and in subordina-
tion to the deeper laws and forces that
determine the very constitution of matter
. and the unknown power and
Pur''osrin P""ciple we term "hfe," — yet,
Jll^vjlJ^ 01^ the other hand, we find that
our world r 1 . 1 r ,
a more careful study of the
outer universe, or cosmos, reveals a new set
of adaptations not less wonderful or more
easily explicable by chance coincidence
than those presented by the organic world.
Even the very brief sketch of the sub-
ject here given suggests the idea of pur-
pose in a world so precisely and uniquely
97
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
adapted to develop organic life, and to
support that life during the countless ages
required for the completed evolution of
man. But that suggestion becomes a
logical induction when the whole of the
available evidence is set forth, as I have
attempted to set it forth in my work on
" Man's Place in the Universe." I have
there shown not only that the cumulative
evidence for the earth being the only sup-
porter of a fully-developed organic life
within the solar system is irresistible, but
that there is some direct, and much more
indirect, evidence that this uniqueness
extends to the whole stellar universe ; and it
is ccEtain that no particle of aired evidence
for the existence of organic life elsewhere
has been, or is likely to be, adduced.
I have also shown (in an appendix to
the second edition of my book) that the
purely biological argument for the unique-
ness of the development of man — as the
culminating point of one line of descent
throughout the diverging ramifications of
the animal kingdom — is overwhelmmgly
strong ; hence the logical conclusion from
the whole of the evidence is that man is
the one supreme product of the whole
material universe.
My object in the present essay has been
limited to showing that, besides and
beyond the special adaptations of the
various kinds of animals and plants to their
special environments, there exist in the
earth as a planet, in its various physical and
cosmical relations, a whole series of adapta-
tions of a very remarkable character which,
so far as we can judge, are essential to its
function as a life-producing world. The
study of these adaptations, therefore, may
be considered to be appropriate here, as
constituting a preliminary chapter in the
natural history of the Earth and of Mankind.
Alfred Russel Wallace
H<:£^>^
/■^
THE BEGINNING OF LIFE
ON THE EARTH
BY DR. C. W. SALEEBY
For some decades past we have been
faced with a critical difficulty at the most
critical and important point in the history
of the earth. In the first place, it has been
definitely established that in the earlier
period of its history there was no life
whatever — as the word is usually under-
stood— upon the earth, as is abundantly
shown elsewhere in this work. None of the
conditions that make life possible, as we
know it. were satisfied. As a recent French
writer has said, life is an aquatic pheno-
menon, absolutely incapable of existence
except in the presence of liquid water ;
and there was an age of vast duration
in the history of the earth when all its
water must have been in the gaseous
state. Other reasons of equal cogency
may be at present ignored. The broad
fact is that, however widely students of
this matter may differ on other points,
there is absolute agreement upon the
cardinal and initial fact that whereas
Ti. r .1. there is life upon the earth
The Earth ,, ^ ,. ,
now, there was a time when
there was none.
Now, in the ever memorable
year 1859, Charles Darwin published a
volume, the main thesis of which is now
universally accepted, wherein the following
is the last sentence : " There is grandeur in
this view of life, with its several powers,
having been originally breathed by the
Creator into a few forms or into one ;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling
on according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning endless forms
most beautiful and most wonderful have
been, and are being evolved." " The
Origin of Species " may be said, in a word,
to establish the doctrine of the evolution
of living organisms upon the earth " by
laws acting around us " — to use Darwin's
own phrase. But Darwin's work begins
with and assumes the existence of life
as an established planetary fact. There
obviously remains a tremendous gap
in the evolutionary philosophy as it stands
in our statement of it thus far ; and the
first fact which we have to note is that
Without
Life
the existence and recognition of this
supposed gap, so far from being a matter
of common recognition from the earliest
times, so far from being an observation
made by the critics of the doctrine of
evolution, is, on the contrary, a speciil
doctrine peculiar to scientific study and
A Gap in the °^ ^"^^^ '"^^^"^ °"S^"' ^^'"&
Philoso h '"'^l<^6d established — as was
ofEvoTuuL supposed— within the memory
of many now livmg.
If we turn to the first chapter of Genesis,
we shall see no suggestion or recognition
of the supposed difficulty involved in the
beginning of life upon the earth. In this
immortal piece of ancient poetry it is
stated that after the creation of the heaven
and the earth, which were at first " with-
out form and void," God said, " Let the
earth bring forth grass . . . and it was
so " ; and later God said, " Let the
waters bring forth abundantly the moving
creature that hath life ... let the earth
bring forth the living creature after his
kind." Here we have suggested to us
the natural origin of living creatures in
earth and sea under the will and direction
of the Creator as conceived by the poet.
Partly to the influence of Genesis,
partly to the apparent facts of observa-
tion, and partly to the views which would
naturally be held by poets and thinkers,
we may attribute the belief which has
been held by man, simple and philosophic
alike, since first men began to think,
until, we may say, the third quarter of the
nineteenth century — the belief that the
lowest of living things arose by a natural
genesis or so-called spontaneous genera-
F" Id ^^^^ ^^ suitable materials
11 rv *^- already provided on the land
on the Origin • ,1 t,
of Life °^ ^^ ^^^' ^ ^^^ "°^
suggested or believed that very
large and conspicuous living creatures were
thus bred, though it is true that the ancients
thought even crocodiles to be generated
by the action of the sun upon the slime
of the Nile. The living creatures supposed
to arise naturally in the womb of earth —
the all-mother — were mostly small crea-
99
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
tures, like insects and worms. The ordi-
nary belief of the uninstructed to-day — a
belief which they share with the greatest
thinkers of antiquity and the Renaissance
— is that the cheese-mite, for instance,
is evolved from the substance of the
cheese. Now, it is of particular moment to
observe the vast contrast between the
. significance of this belief prior
The Coming ^^ the publication of "The
° . Origin of Species " and its
significance to-day. Before we
accepted the doctrine of organic evolution,
the supposed spontaneous origin of the
cheese-mite in cheese, or of the maggot
in putrid meat, was of no very great
moment ; a maggot or a cheese-mite is
an extremely insignificant object. So
far as the great problems of the universe
are concerned, a cheese-mite, as we say,
is neither " here nor there," and its spon-
taneous generation was not regarded as a
fact of any great moment.
But then there arose Darwin, who, in
establishing the doctrine of organic evolu-
tion already supported by his own grand-
father, by Lamarck, and Goethe, and
Herbert Spencer, gave an entirely new
importance to the question. He demon-
strated how we could conceive the evolution
of all organisms, including man, from a
" few simple forms," under the continuous
influence of natural law ; and thus such
forms ceased to be insignificant, and the
manner of their genesis came to be a vital
problem in more senses than one. Such
organisms — the mite, the maggot, and
even the mould — could no longer be re-
garded as insignificant, for they were
revealed as not unlike the ancestors of man
himself.
The question of the beginning of life upon
the earth had only to be satisfactorily
answered for the establishment of the
belief in a continuous process of evolution
by natural law, even from the very begin-
ning of the earth itself " without form and
_ , ^. void," until the production of
Evolution a ,1 i,- i, j. t •
„ .. the highest livmg organisms
Continuous i • i_ ■■ j- i ■
_ which it displays in our own
A roccss
time. And all ages, even by the
mouths of their great thinkers and closest
observers, had agreed in giving an ap-
parently satisfactory answer to this ques-
tion. It might well have been thought
that Darwin was quite entitled to ignore
altogether, as he did, the question of the
origin of life. Everyone knew, so to say,
that simple living organisms were every
100
day evolved in organic refuse and else-
where. Darwin himself, if we may judge
from a casual remark in a letter, regarded
the question apparently as purely specula-
tive, and of small real moment. It is
all rubbish, he says, thinking about the
origin of life ; we might as well argue
about the origin of matter. We must be-
ware of illegitimately attributing opinions
to the immortal dead, but this remark,
though a casual one, does seem to suggest
that Darwin regarded these two questions
as on aU-fours, if not, indeed, as different
forms of the same question, and that, if
he had actually formulated his views,
they would have taken the shape of the
doctrine which asserts that life is implicit
and potential in matter ; in other words,
that when suitable conditions arose —
such, for instance, as the presence of liquid
water — matter would display the pro-
perties of life.
Now, the remarkable fact — one of the
most striking in the history of science —
is that the time-honoured belief in spon-
taneous generation should have been
attacked, and attacked with apparent
success, just at the very time
when it would otherwise have
begun to assume real philo-
sophic importance. For ages
it had been accepted, taken as a matter
of course, and not regarded as having
any particular bearing upon the supreme
questions. Then there came the time
when this belief would have been an
all-important link, without which the
chain of evolution could not be com-
pleted, a link without which we were left
to contemplate a perfect chain of inorganic
evolution — the history of the earth before
life — and a perfect chain of organic evolu-
tion— the history of life upon the earth,
with an abyss between the two that could
not be bridged, for how came life where
there was no life ? A series of experiments
were made, experiments in which, strikingly
enough, some of the greatest evolutionists
of the day took a leading part, and these
seemed to upset, just when it was most
wanted by themselves for the establish-
ment of their new doctrine, the belief
which had gone without question for so
many ages.
Now, some may be inclined to wonder
how it should be that certain pioneers
of the new doctrine of evolution, such
as Tyndall and Huxley, should devote
themselves with such persistence and
An Abyss
that could not
be Bridged
THE BEGINNING OF LIFE ON THE EARTH
labour and force to the overthrow of a
doctrine which was so necessary for the
complete establishment of their own case
— so much so, that when they had over-
thrown it, they found themselves, as regards
their own doctrine of evolution, placed
in a difficulty from which they did not
live to emerge. It is my own belief that
this question can be answered, and the
answer is of strict relevance to our present
inquiry. I believe that Huxley and Tyn-
dall were largely impelled by the desire to
oppose a doctrine of the nature of life
which was current in their time and is
usually called "vitalism." We shall not
begin to understand the question of the
beginning of life upon the earth, as that
question may be legitimately stated to-
day, unless we fully realise in what terms
the doctrine of spontaneous generation
was accepted in the past, and an under-
standing of this will teach us that the
present-day revival of this doctrine pre-
sents it in a form very different from that
which it so long held. Our discussion must
be somewhat philosophic in character,
but the question at issue is a highly
philosophic one, and the reason why we
have made so little progress in
^ . '/ ir answering it hitherto is that
only Self- r • v , r
^ men of science have too fre-
quently discussed it without
paying any serious attention to the pro-
found philosophic questions which really
underlie it. We have permitted ourselves
to talk freely about life and matter, whilst
claiming the right to take for granted the
absolute validity of our conceptions of
life and our conceptions of matter.
It was universally held by those,
philosophic and simple, who also held
throughout so many centuries the belief
in spontaneous generation, that there
is an overwhelming contrast between
living and lifeless matter, and it was their
belief in this overwhelming contrast that
led them to give to the doctrine of spon-
taneous generation, as they held it, a form
which cannot possibly be defended. The
great character of life was conceived to be
self-movement, this self-movement being
displayed in the matter which composed
the living organisms. But it was univers-
ally held that matter, as it was seen
otherwise than in living organisms, was
obviously and notoriously inert, gross,
brute, and dead.
The great influence of Plato taught men
to despise matter in this fashion, and
there was the everyday experience that
a stone lies where it is placed until some-
thing from outside moves it, being,
therefore, inert, whilst a living creature
such as a bird moves freely at its own
will. The more strongly men held the
natural matter of which the earth is com-
posed to be inert, the more necessary was
_. it to suppose that when life
J J. was displayed in it the dif-
f PI ference consisted in the taking
possession of this dull clay
by a vital force — a mystic and wonderful
principle of quickening — which endowed
even gross, inert matter with activity and
power. From the time of Plato until the
last few years of the nineteenth century
thinkers vied with one another in insisting
upon the impotence and grossness and
inertness of matter, and each fresh
insistence upon this doctrine rendered
more necessary a corresponding doctrine
of vital force or vitalism, which should
explain the amazing transformation under-
gone by, let us say, the gross and inert
matter composing food, when that food
was converted by the " living principle "
into the tissue of a living creature, and
then displayed self-movement.
This doctrine of vitalism, which held
sway for so long, was naturally invoked
to explain the origin of life upon the
earth, when the advance of astronomy
and geology demonstrated a natural
evolution for the earth and proved that
there must have been a time when no life
was possible upon it. The prevalent
conception of matter came in at this
point and denied altogether any such
monstrous doctrine as that the wonderful
thing called life could spontaneously
arise in the despicable thing called matter.
The material of the earth, whether solid,
liquid or gaseous, consisted of eternal,
unchangeable, and indestructible atoms.
These were moved as forces from out-
side moved them. They had no energy
p or power of their own.
f D°^°d ^ ^^^^ simply thought of them
»j as of incredibly minute
grains of sand of various
shapes and sizes, and it was as im-
possible to conceive of life being spon-
taneously generated in a chance heap
of inert atoms as to conceive that a
heap of grains of sand should organise
themselves into a little organism. As for
spontaneous generation occurring on the
earth to-day, the development of mites
lOI
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
from cheese and so forth, that was a very
different matter, men must have thought —
in so far as they thought at all — since
cheese and flesh and so forth were them-
selves products of life. It is well worth
noting that the common doctrine of
spontaneous generation was always held
in reference to organic materials, such
_ _ as the slime of the Nile — not
y, .^ the dry sand of the desert.
, x> t The reader may be inclined to
of Pasteur , > ur t +u-
say that men s belieis on this
subject in the past generation make very
confused reading, and indeed, that is true.
But the fact is that their beliefs were most
confused. The work of Darwin had
staggered everybody, and straightforward,
systematic, unprejudiced thinking was very
nearly impossible in the welter of con-
troversy. Nevertheless, something ap-
parently definite was done. The doctrine
of the beginning of life upon the earth
was left almost undiscussed, and the
accepted notion of the nature of matter —
a notion which to us who know radium
seems puerile — was left unchallenged in
all its falsity. But the work of the great
French chemist Pasteur led to a close
examination of the belief that humble
forms of life are daily produced from life-
less organic materials, and the conclusion
was reached that no such spontaneous
generation occurs.
This conclusion is of great importance
in the history of modern thought, and
it was proclaimed with much rejoicing
and vigour as a great achievement of
science, whilst some of its chief advocates
seemed at times to forget the extreme
awkwardness of the inferences which had
to be made from it. The doctrine may
be stated in Latin in the form of the
familiar dogma, " Omne vivum ex vivo,"
every living thing from a living thing.
Just as the existence of a man is quite
sufficient to prove to us the prior existence
of living human parents, just as we feel
J, , . . sure that every beast of the
Living Thing f "^ ^hat every oak has sprung
irom an acorn developed m a
previous oak, so, according to the doctrine
of " Omne vivum ex vivo," we must
believe that every living creature, whether
human, animal, or vegetable, whether as
big as the mammoth or as small as the
smallest microbe not one-twenty-thou-
sandth part of an inch in diameter, has
sprung from living parents. Nature,
102
according to this doctrine, was divided — as
Nature, being a mighty whole, can never
be divided — into two absolute categories,
the living and the lifeless, or living matter
and dead matter. Dead matter was
notoriously dead and impotent, and life
could not conceivably arise in it, though
it could be used by life for purposes of
food. On the other hand, living matter
rejoiced in the possession of all those
great attributes which lifeless matter
lacked, and, in accordance with the
contrast between the two kinds of matter,
the living could never be produced from
the lifeless but only from the living : for
every creature, microbe or mammoth or
man, we must trace back in imagination
a series of living ancestors, differing
perhaps in various characters, but always
living. This series must be traced back
and back and back until ?
And there the difficulty arose. For
the uninhabitableness of the primitive
earth was a fact of which men of science
were as certain as if from some habitable
planet they had been able to gaze upon it.
Notwithstanding the dogma of " Omne
w .1. T. . .vivum ex vivo," it was im-
Life Evolved i , , . ii, -
, possible to assert that every
*K f -f I living creature has an endless
series oi ancestors. How, then,
did life begin ?
What we may call the doctrine of the
older orthodoxy — the doctrine of special
creation, of supernatural interposition for
the introduction of a new entity into the
scheme of things — offered one alternative.
To accept it, however, would be to
abandon the whole modern conception of
natural law and of a universe which was
not created once on a day, and has not
been tinkered with subsequently, but
from everlasting to everlasting is the con-
tinuous expression to us of the Infinite
and Eternal Power which to some eyes
it veils and to others it reveals. Unless
we are to abandon our philosophy, this
alternative cannot be accepted, and it is
now accepted by no philosophic thinker.
Thus, whether " Omne vivum ex vivo "
be true or false to-day, we are compelled
to accept the only other alternative, which
is that it has not always been true, or, in
other words, that life was spontaneously
evolved from the lifeless (so-called) at some
remote age in the past. Just at the
present time philosophic biology is out of
fashion. Minds of the great cast which
endeavour to see things in their eternal
LORD KELVIN
MASTER THINKERS WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO OUR KNOWLEDGE OF LIFE
Photos by Gerschel, Maull Sc Fox, E. Walker, London Stereoscopic, Barraud, and Mills
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
aspect have been lacking to the science
of Hfe since the days when Huxley and
Spencer were in the plenitude of their
powers. Anyone who cares to compare
the principal reviews of the last decade
with those same reviews from the year
of, say, 1875 to 1890, can readily see this
fact for himself. In the absence of that
deliberate thought and discussion without
which clear ideas on any subject are
impossible, what may be called the official
opinion of biology at the present time is
thus most remarkable and contradictory.
On the one hand, it is strenuously asserted
as a matter of dogma that at the present
day no life is produced or producible upon
the earth except by the process of repro-
duction of previously existing life ; and
on the other hand it is asserted — when the
direct question is put, though otherwise
the subject is simply ignored — that life
must somehow or other have been
naturally evolved in the past, presum-
ably once and for all. I have called this
opinion contradictory, and it is indeed far
more contradictory and unsatisfactory
than it may at present appear. The
obvious question that the critic asks
is, "If then, why not now?"
" If then,
why
The answer alleged is that,
,,, of course, the experiments
of Pasteur and Tyndall, to
which some reference must afterwards be
made here, merely demonstrated the
impossibility of the spontaneous genera-
tion of life in our own day or under any
conditions similar to those of our own
day ; but doubtless the first few simple
forms of living matter arose by natural
processes at some distant epoch " when
the conditions were very different from
those that obtain to-day." Now it hap-
pens to be true that every difference
between past and present conditions which
physics and geology and chemistry can
assert tends to the probability that if
spontaneous generation is impossible now,
it must have been a hundredfold more
impossible a hundred million years ago.
Yet for some three decades the great
majority of biologists have been content
to believe that spontaneous generation is
impossible now, even though land and
sea and sky are packed with organic
matter under the very conditions which
obviously favour life — as the all but
omnipresence of life abundant to-day
demonstrates — but that spontaneous
generation was possible in the past when,
104
by the hypothesis, there was no organic
matter present at all, and when life had to
arise in the union and architecture of
such simple substances as inorganic car-
bonates ! Such biologists are like those
who know that the human organism can
be developed from the microscopic
germ in a few years, but find it
, _ ., -, incredible that man can have
Is Life Now 1 J ^ J X 11
... , been developed from lowly
Arising from ■ ■ j- -^
♦K I -f I 9 organisms m aeons of aeons. .
JNor has any livmg biologist
even attempted to make an adequate
answer to the question, why what is
impossible now should have been possible
a hundred million years ago. On the
contrary, so soon as the matter is looked
at philosophically, we see that all the
probabilities, all the analogies, all the
great generalisations of science, are in
favour of the belief that life must be
arising from the lifeless now, as in the
past, whenever certain conditions, such
as the assemblage of carbon, oxygen,
nitrogen and hydrogen in the presence of
liquid water, are satisfied.
For the moment, however, I propose to
postpone this question of the truth of
" Omne vivum ex vivo " at the present
day, for I desire to throw into the fore-
front of my argument two quite recent
developments of science, unreckoned with
because non-existent in the controversy
of the 'seventies, and in my judgment not
yet duly appraised to-day. In the present
and future discussion of the manner and
causation of that supreme event in the
earth's history, the beginning of life upon
it, we must reckon with two new orders of
inquiry relating to facts unthinkably con-
trasted in physical magnitude yet equally
relevant to our subject. The first series
of facts with which I will deal are astro-
nomic, and the second atomic.
In discussing the origin of life upon the
earth, we of the twentieth century must
recognise such facts as may be obtainable
in regard to life upon other
orbs than ours. Now, in the
i^^i!" \iT ij first place, there is at least
Other Worlds fi . •
one illustrious contemporary
astronomer. Professor Pickering, the chief
living student of the moon, in whose opinion
there are many evidences upon our
satellite of the action of vegetation, either
past or present. This, of course, is not
the place for a discussion of that evidence ;
it is, however, the place to record the
most highly qualified opinion at present
The Evidence
from
THE BEGINNING OF LIFE ON THE EARTH
obtainable, and to remind ourselves of the
certainty that when the moon was first
borne — or born — from the earth, life
caqnot possibly have been evolved, since
the conditions of temperature alone, to
name one factor, were such as life could
not sustain, no liquid water being extant.
There is some reason to suppose, then, .
that, whatever the present
cgc a c ^^^g ^^y ^^^ ^-^g ^^^ ^^ Qj^g
„ time spontaneously evolved
on Mars ., ^ -'
upon the moon.
The second piece of astronomical evi-
dence relevant to our inquiry is afforded
by the planet Mars. This, of course, is
a much controverted question, which
cannot receive any discussion here. It
suffices to note that Professor Lowell, who
is admittedly the greatest living authority
on Mars, has observed and photographed,
not merely to his own satisfaction, but
to that of an ever increasing number of
astronomei's, signs of vegetation upon
Mars. I will say nothing here as to the
existence of intelligent beings there.
That fascinating and momentous question,
upon which there will doubtless be differ-
ence of opinion for some time to come, does
not now concern us. It is of quite sufficient
significance for our present purpose if
the existence of merely vegetable life,
and no more, upon the planet Mars can
be demonstrated, and there are now very
few astronomers indeed who question
this demonstration, however chary they
may be of going any further. I submit
that the question of the beginning of life
upon the earth should not be considered
without reference to the evidence which
suggests the spontaneous origin of life
upon the moon, and to the practically
positive demonstration of the present
existence, with seasonal alternations, as
on our own earth, of vegetable life in the
watered areas of Mars.
These considerations were entirely un-
known to the great controversialists of a
_, _ ^ , generation ago ; but there
The Earth s P , i r . ,
^ is another order of facts, en-
rum mg tirely unimagined by them.
Foundations , . •<, "^ -^ , '
which are now demon-
strable and admitted. For them, or for
most of them, the ancient conception
of matter which we trace to Plato was
substantially true ; nay, more. The
recent work of the physicists and chemists
had endowed that ancient conception
of matter as gross and inert and dead
with a new concreteness and vividness.
One of the greatest physicists of the age,
James Clerk-Maxwell, in his famous
address to the British Association, spoke
of atoms as the " foundation stones of the
visible universe, which have existed since
the creation unbroken and unworn."
The accepted conception of an atom was
that of a passive thing ; it had its own
inherent shape and properties, which
were impressed upon it at its creation.
It had " the stamp of the manufactured
article," as Sir John Herschell said, and
throughout its endless history it responded
to and behaved under the influence of
external forces in due accordance with
its shape and size. But it was unchange-
able, inert and brute, the sport of its
surroundings, like the mote in the sun-
beam.
But to-day we stand amazed at such
conceptions. We have learnt that within
the atoms of matter there is a fund of
energy so incalculably vast that the sum
total of all the energies previously,
recognised, and now to be styled extra-
atomic, is as nothing compared with it.
This is a change indeed, that all the
energies hitherto known to us should be
merely the overflow trickling
from the immeasurable ocean
of the intra-atomic energy, the
very existence of which has
been formally and repeatedly denied by
practically all thinkers from Plato down
to our own time. Matter is not gross and
inert, brute and dead. The atom, the
so-called unchangeable foundation stone,
is, on the contrary, itself an organism,
the theatre of Titanic forces about which
we at present know practically nothing
except that they certainly exist, and are
powerful beyond all our previous con-
ceptions. The atom is no atom, but a
microcosm ; it is no more the unit of
inorganic matter than the cell is really
the unit of living matter.
Now it is surely evident on considera-
tion, though the significance of the change
has been ignored, that the whole dis-
cussion of the spontaneous origin or
evolution of life in matter takes an entirely
new shape when our old and widely
erroneous conception of matter is aban-
doned, and a true one is substituted.
Life is a marvellous and characteristic
demonstration of energy. When the
origin of this energy in matter was
formerly discussed, we were told that the
constituent parts of matter contain no
105
Immeasurable
Ocean
of Energy
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
energy at all, but now we know that a
quite overwhelming proportion of the
sum total of universal energy is to be
found there, and nowhere else. This is
one of the most revolutionary advances
in the whole history of thought, and its
full significance has yet to be recognised.
There must also be added an essential
to any future discussion of this question,
the extraordinary achievement of synthetic
chemistry, of which Professor Berthelot was
the grand master. As long ago as 1828 it
was shown that there was at least one
exception to the doctrine of the vitalists,
that chemical compounds characteristic of
living matter cannot be built up except
by the living organism. To-day chemistry
has succeeded in building up alcohols,
starches, sugars, and even the forerunners
of the proteids themselves, from the
inorganic elements in the laboratory, under
the action of non-vital forces. This fact
could not be reckoned with a generation ago.
We are now entitled to state very
briefly the sequence of events which
may reasonably be imagined as culmin-
ating in the origin of life upon the earth
for the first time. Whatever we may hold
as to the present, we have to
recognise that the origin of life
for the first time constituted
a fact utterly different in
certain essentials from any origin of life
that may be expected to be occurring
to-day. The capital fact is that in the
beginning there was no organic matter
to serve as food material. If ever there
was a case in which it is the first step that
costs, it is here. Nothing can be easier
than to imagine the spontaneous origin of
Hfe in organic matter to-day, favoured
with sun and water and air. The case is
far different when a primary origin in
inorganic matter has to be conceived.
But of some things we are certain. We
are certain, for instance, that so long as
the earth's surface temperature was above
that of boiling water, no life was possible.
It was not until the gaseous water in
the atmosphere became liquefied by the
lowering of the earth's temperature that
the production of life became possible.
The first seas were seas of boiling water,
or rather water infinitesimally. below the
boiling point, and we may reasonably
suppose, with Buffon, that the Polar seas,
being the first to cool, mu.'^^t have provided
the first " nest " for life upon the earth.
I assume, of course, that this essay will be
106
Can Che-
mistry Build
Up Life?
read in conjunction with that of Professor
Sollas upon the formation of the earth
[page 79], and that of Dr. Wallace upon
the exquisite adaptation between life and
the earth to-day [page 91].
But how were those complex organic
bodies formed, especially those vastly
complex proteids with which all life
whatsoever, as we know it, is
" ^ invariably associated ? Apart
P from the laboratories of the syn-
thetic chemists of to-day, these
compounds are always the products of
pre-existing life, and yet without them
there could be no pre-existing life.
It is my belief that this most difficult
question, which quite baffles us, will seem
simple and straightforward in another
generation, when science has devoted
itself on a large scale to a study now
in its very infancy — I mean the study of
those curious bodies which chemists call
ferments. The properties of ferments are
shared both by the familiar ferments, such
as trypsin and pepsin, and also by certain
inorganic substances, such as the metal
platinurn. Now, though pepsin is a product
of living cells, platinum is certainly riot.
Altogether apart from the living world
there are substances which have powers
of fermentation ; and ferments do not act
exclusively, as is erroneously supposed, in
breaking down complex compounds, but
also build them up from their constituents.
The powers of a ferment, moreover,
are, so far as we know, inexhaustible.
All life whatever is exercised by ferments,
and it is true that life, chemically con-
sidered, is "a series of fermentations."
Now, there is quite recent evidence already
which seems to show that certain ferments,
acting in suitable material, have the power
of reproducing themselves— that is to say,
of converting that material into their like.
These facts are highly suggestive, and it is
difficult to refrain from suggesting that
the gap between living and lifeless matter,
which seemed so ■ absolute to
ys «ry ^^^^. j^j^(.gg^Qi-3^ ^j^fj which even
c *° ""^' ^^^ have a new con-
ception of matter, seems wide
enough, may yet be bridged by the
ferments. We are far too apt, I think,
to assume , that when we can see no
intermediate stage there were no
intermediate stages, and thus to make
difficulties for ourselves. We declare
that life began as a single cell, which was
the starting-point of organic evolution.
THE BEGINNING OF LIFE ON THE EARTH
I myself believe rather that the cell consti-
tutes" the acme of a vast epoch of evolution,
which may yet be reproduced in brief in
the laboratory. Denying or declining to
think of this, the biologist who knows the
amazing complexity and intricacy of the
architecture of the cell may well decline
to believe that such a thing could spring
J c II ^^^^ ^ single jump from in-
T. J * , organic matter. We preach and
a Product of ^ , . , , ^ , ^^ ,
_ , ^. „ go on preachmg that ^lature
Evolution? 3 J.I.- 1, ■ J •
does nothmg by jumps, and m
the same breath we declare that life began
as a simple cell. In another hundred years
we may begin to realise that a cell in its
own measure and on its own scale is an
organism, as complex and mature a pro-
duct of evolution as a society, or, for the
matter of that, as the atom of modern
chemistry !
But the reader will legitimately declare
that so long as the spontaneous generation
of life to-day in the most favourable cir-
cumstances is a proved impossibility, he
cannot be expected to accept the doctrine
of its spontaneous origin in the past. There
are signs, however, that the biologists are
now beginning to listen to Dr. Charlton
Bastian, the sole survivor from the great
controversy of the 'seventies, whose book,
" The Evolution of Life," was published
only a few months ago. Against Pasteur
and Tyndall and Huxley, Dr. Bastian main-
tained that their experiments, asserted to
be conclusive, were not conclusive — the
facts observed were certainly facts, but
the deductions were unwarrantable. The
experiments only proved the impossi-
bility under the experimental conditions.
The difference is the difference between
proving what you set out to prove, and
begging the whole question. First establish
conditions under which spontaneous gen-
eration is impossible, then demonstrate
its non-occurrence under those conditions,
and thence infer that it is impossible under
any conditions.
_ The student is right in
ft ^^^ declining to believe in the
P spontaneous beginning of life
upon the earth so long as the
possibility of spontaneous generation to-
day is denied, but there are not a few
who think that the most conservative
attitude that can be adopted is one of
suspended judgment.
The present philosophic tendency is un-
doubtedly in the direction of a return to
the ancient conception that matter is not
without its own degree of life, and that the
distinction between the organic and the
inorganic is a distinction of degree and
not radical. Nature does not admit of being
sorted into any of our puny categories.
As the facts accumulate they point more
and more definitely towards the opinion
that hylozoism, or the doctrine of poten-
tial life in all matter, will be part of the
scientific creed of the future.
Controversies as to the origin of life,
judged in the light of this great conception,
seem to become trivial if not puerile.
Knowing, as we now do, that Plato's
conception of matter was as false as it
possibly could be, and having had re-
vealed to us by radio-activity the omni-
presence within the very atoms of matter,
of forces incessant and stupendous, we
find the doctrine of vitalism, however
stated, to be wholly meaningless ; we find
that the gap between the living and the
lifeless is by no means abysmal or im-
passable.
And the definition of life as self-move-
ment seems to become almost comical,
for on that definition surely the whole
„ _ physical universe, the only per-
ow ong pg|^^^^J^Q|-JQJ^J^g^chine we know
E • t a ? of, is itself alive. A discussion of
this question can at the utmost
only be suggestive. Very few positive
assertions have been made, nor can their
number be added to, in reference to a
question which is bound to be asked : How
long has life existed on the earth ? The
study of radium and its presence in the
earth's crust alone suffices to abolish
altogether the old estimates, and new
ones cannot yet be substituted. Only it is
certain that the past history of planetary
life may be far longer than any previous
estimate has indicated. It now seems that
the earth is not only not self-cooling, but
actually self-heating, and if on the older
assumption Lord Kelvin could talk of a
hundred million years since, so to speak,
water first became wet, and life, as we know
it, possible, who shall say of how long
periods we may speculate now ? Mean-
while, the glass-eyed stare vacantly around
them and declare that the progress of
science means the destruction of the
spirit of wonder and reverence. To them
we reply in the words of the Earth Spirit
in Goethe's " Faust " :
" At the whirring loom of Time unawed,
I weave the hving garment of God."
C. W. Saleeby
107
THE MASTERY OF THE EARTH
AND HOW MAN OBTAINED IT
BY DR. ARCHDALL REID
ALL the world— at any rate, all that part
of the world which is acquainted
with the facts — is now agreed that man
is a product of evolution, and that his
remote ancestors were of different bodily
make and shape, and of different mental
type and calibre, from their late descend-
ants. No study of human kind can be com-
prehensive that does not include a survey
of the mode by which the faculties that
have given man the mastery of the earth
were evolved.
A history of his evolution, based, like
a pohtical history, on episodes, cannot, of
course, be written. But man is a bundle
of parts and capabihties. By comparing
the civilised being with the savage and the
savage with lower animals, we are able to
trace, in many important particulars at
least, his natural history with a degree of
certainty to which, I think, no political
history can aspire. As our comprehension
of adult man is helped by a
We Know knowledge of the development
the Present „r ,i i -ij ^^ ^„^ „„^^^c-+o»i^
by the Past
of the child, so our understand-
ing of our species is aided by a
study of its past. Armed with some clear
conceptions of what man was, and is, we
shall be the better fitted to investigate social
and political change, and to perceive how it
happens that while some nations have
inherited the earth and the fruits thereof,
others have stagnated or fallen into decay.
At a certain stage in his development
the caterpiUar builds himself a cocoon.
His dwelling is a wonderful structure, but
from our human point of view the re-
markable thing is that he does not learn
to build it. He may never have seen a
cocoon before, and he constructs only one
in his life. Yet his work is perfect, or at
least very excellent, and it is as good in
its beginnings as in its endings. Evidently
he ( -ves nothing to experience, but is
imi^elled and guided throughout by a
faculty which we term instinct. An instinct
may be defined as an innate, inherited
impulse, an inclination to do a certain
definite act, the instinctive act, on receipt
io8
of a certain definite stimulus or incitement
to action. In the case of the caterpillar
the stimulus appears to be the sight at the
proper time of a suitable spot in which to
build a cocoon. Since this particular impulse
does not appear at the beginning of con-
scious life, it is termed a deferred instinct.
Man, on the other hand, cannot build
his house unless he first learns
ow an j^^^^ ^^ build. He depends, not
Learns by • i- j_ i ^
_ .on mstmct, but on experience.
Experience ^, c ^^ ^ c
Ihe faculty by means of
which experience is stored in the mind is
memory. The faculty by means of which
we use stored experience to guide present
or future conduct is intelligence. When
the contents of memory are very vast,
and the processes of thought by which
they are utilised comparatively difficult
and complex, intelligence is termed reason.
Intelligence and reason depend, therefore,
on memory, on ability to learn, on
capacity to profit by experience. Memory
is not the whole of intelligence, but it is the
basis of it. Without memory there could
be feeling and emotion, but no thought, for
the materials of thought would be lacking.
We always measure the intelligence of an
animal by its power of profiting by ex-
perience. Thus, a cat is more intelligent
than a rabbit because it can learn more ;
a dog, for the same reason, is still more in-
telligent. A purely instinctive animal,
one that has no memory, can have no con-
ception of its past, and therefore no idea
of its future. It lives wholly in the im-
mediate present ; feeling, but not think-
ing. It acts entirely on inclina-
Instinct tion, not on reflection. It makes
in Place of pj-Q^.j^ion fo^ the future, not
Memory ^^^-^j^ ^^^ notion of providing,
but simply because it has an impulse
to a certain course of action, the per-
formance of which gives it pleasure of the
kind a child derives from playing or eating,
and with the ultimate result of which it
is no more consciously concerned than a
child. If a caterpillar sheltered ii a hole
with the idea, founded on past experience,
HOW MAN OBTAINED THE MASTERY OF THE EARTH
The Basis
of Rational
Action
of avoiding danger, his action would be
intelligent. If, appealing to a memory in
which a great number of complex expe-
riences were stored, he took thought and
designed himself a shelter in
which provision was made for
all sorts of remembered dangers,
his action would be rational.
But if, making no appeal to the past
nor taking thought for the future, he
builds only because impelled by an
innate impulse, then, no matter how
elaborate the edifice he rears, his action
is instinctive.
Animals low in the scale of life — for
example, most insects — appear incapable
of learning. But often they are won-
derfully equipped by instinct. The de-
tails of the behaviour of a small beetle,
as quoted from Professor Lloyd Morgan,
may not have been quite correctly ascer-
tained, but the}^ are sufficiently accurate
for our purpose.
A certain beetle (Sitaris) lays its eggs at the
entrance of the galleries excavated by a kind of
bee (Anthophora), each gallery leading to a cell.
The young larvae are hatched as active little
insects, with six legs, two long antenna?, and
four eyes, very different from the larvae of other
beetles. They emerge from the egg in the autumn,
and remain in a sluggish condition till the spring.
At that time (in April) the drones of the bee
emerge from the pupae, and as they pass out
through the gallery the Sitaris larvae fasten upon
them. There they remain till the nuptial flight
of the Anthophora, when the larva passes from
the male to the female bee. Then again they wait
their chance. The moment the bee lays an egg,
the Sitaris larva springs upon it. Even while the
poor mother is carefully fastening up her cell,
her mortal enemy is beginning to devour her
offspring, for the egg of the Anthophora serves
not only as a raft, but as a repast. The honey,
which is enough for either, would be too little
for both, and the Sitaris, therefore, at its first
meal, relieves itself from its only rival. After
eight days the egg is consumed, and on the empty
shell the Sitaris undergoes its first transformation,
and makes its appearance in a very different
form. ... It changes into a white, fleshy
grub, so organised as to float on the surface of the
honey, with the mouth beneath and the spiracles
above the surface. ... In this state it re-
mains until the honey is consumed, and, after
some further metamorphoses, develops into a
perfect beetle in August.
The beetle has sense organs ; therefore
she feels. But we have no
reason to suppose that she
remembers or thinks. Memory
would be of little use to her ;
parsimonious Nature bestows
httle or none. Cast adrift in a hostile
world, she must come into existence
ready armed by instinct for the battle of
Wonderful
Instinct of
the Beetle
therefore
life. She has no time to learn, and during
the rapid and strange changes in her
career has little opportunity of acquiring
knowledge that could beneficially guide
her future conduct. Since memory and
its corollary reflection are most developed
in the highest animals, and are impercep-
tible m the lower, they are clearly later
and higher products of evolution than
instinct.
Family life is a product of memory,
for the mate and offspring are r<j-cognised ;
therefore it always implies some degree
of intelligence. The young are watched
and protected, and taught by the higher
animals. Opportunities are thus afforded
of learning about the world, and more
particularly of acquiring the traditions,
the stored experiences, of the race. With
the opportunity to profit by experience
comes the ability to profit by it, and with
the latter a gradual decay of instinct.
Intelligence is substituted, more or less,
for unthinking impulse. All the instincts
are not lost, but in the higher animals
we find no such elaborate innate impulses
as in the lower. " Sitaris " is able to fend
for herself from the first ; but
just in proportion as animals
are highly placed in the scale
of life, so they are helpless
at the beginnings of consciousness, but
correspondingly capable later. A young
pig can run as soon as it is born, but the
acquirements of the most learned pig
are small compared to that of a dog,
which, though more helpless than the pig
at birth, is so teachable that he becomes
the companion of man. Our domestic
animals are all teachable, otherwise we
could not tame them.
Of living beings man is by far the most
helpless at birth. He cannot even seek
the breast. In him instinct is at its
minimum. For him more than any other
animal prolonged and elaborate tuition
is necessary ; but so vast is his memory,
and so great his power of utilising its
stored experience, that in later life he is
beyond comparison the most capable of
the inhabitants of the earth. Compare
what even a dull man knows, including
the words of a language and its inflections
and articulations, with what is acquired by
the cleverest dog, and the immensity of
the difference is at once apparent. We
may take a solitary frog and rear him
from the egg in an aquarium. If, subse-
quently, we remove him to a pond, he
109
Man's
Helplessness
at Birth
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
will take his place with his fellows at once.
He has little, if anything, to learn. In-
stinctively he knows his food, and how
to seek it ; his enemies and rivals, and
how to escape or light them ; his mate,
and how to deal with her ; and she knows
how to dispose of her eggs. But how
forlorn and helpless would be a man
reared from infancy in a dark cell out of
sight and sound of his kind, and then
turned into a world where his experienced
fellows struggle for existence !
Traditional knowledge — knowledge, that
is, imparted by one generation to the next
— is common enough amongst the higher
of the lower animals, and forms no
inconsiderable part of their mental equip-
ment. Thus we may see the hen teaching
her chickens how to seek food, and the
cat instructing her kitten how to ambush
mice. Birds and mammals inhabiting
desert islands have none of that fear of
man which in our country they acquire
from dire experience. We have a saying,
" as wild as a hawk " ; but Darwin
relates how he almost pushed a hawk
from its perch with his gun in the Gala-
17. • ^t pagos Islands. Round our coasts
Fear IS the Ii i ■ i ^■ ^
„ ,^ - the sea-birds are exceedmgly
Result of , . 11 .. r J
£ . shy ; m a harbor they teed
xpenence ^^^^ ^j^g hand. Formerly
the Arctic seals, impelled by fear of bears,
inhabited the outer margin of the floes ;
at the present day they have retreated
from the more dangerous neighbourhood
of man to the landward edge. Antarctic
seals, harried by the great carnivora of
the ocean, are watchful in the water ;
on land or on the surface of the ice, where
till lately they met no danger, they may
be slaughtered like sheep in a shambles.
They are capable of profiting by experi-
ence ; but they are slow to learn, and can
acquire but little. Judged by our human
standard, they are very stupid. The means
of escape adopted by Arctic seals, and
the means of capturing them, the ships and
f^uns adopted by man, furnish a measure
of the intellectual difference.
When animals are social, and so have
the opportunity of learning, not only
from their parents, but from other mem-
bers of the species, the power of making
useful mental acquirements is corre-
spondingly great. It reaches a remarkable
degree of development even amongst
insects, some species of which live
together in great communities. Young
ants, for example, are tended with anxious
no
care. It is said that they are led about
the nest and instructed by older indi-
viduals. They are reported to be playful.
Most significant of all is the fact that
some species have the habit of capturing
slaves belonging to other species, which
they take as pupse, never as adult ants,
and to whom, as they develop, they teach
their duties. The slaves are
Slavery
in the World
neuter individuals, and have
o7hrsrct's'""° offspring, the supply being
maintained by fresh captures.
It follows that the slaves must learn their
work, and therefore that their performance
of it is not instinctive, but intelligent.
It is a fair inference that many of the
so-called instincts of ants, are really
acquired habits, bits of knowledge and
ways of thinking and acting which are
handed down from one generation to the
next, not by actual inheritance, but
traditionally and educationally, just as
children receive from us language, or
religion, or a trade. Indeed, there is
reason to believe that the power of making
mental acquirements has evolved to a
greater degree in the favourable environ-
ment of the ant-nest than among any other
species except man.
The instincts of man, though compara-
tively few and simple, are yet essential
to his existence. He has the instinct of
hunger and the instinctive recognition
of food as food, the instincts to sleep
periodically, to rest when tired, and to
sport when rested, the instincts of curiosity
and imitativeness, and the deferred in-
stincts of sexual and parental love, and
perhaps one or two others. All these innate
impulses he shares with the lower animals,
but those which impel him to store and
use his vaster memory are more developed
in him than in any other type. Thus the
instinct of sport urges him, not only to
develop his limbs, but, through experience,
to acquire dexterity and much besides.
The httle girl turns naturally to her doll,
, which she handles as she will
Es'lential ^^^ ^^^^^ '^^^ P^^^ °^ ^ ^^^
ssen la ^^ naturally involves contests.
Instincts 1 • 1 r 1 J J.-U
which foreshadow the grimmer
battles of adult life. As he grows older the
character of his sport changes. More and
more it becomes an appeal to the wits,
an appeal to wider experience and a means
of adding to it.
The higher amongst the lower animals
also have their sports, which, in every
instance, are adapted to fit the members
HOW MAN OBTAINED THE MASTERY OF THE EARTH
of the species for the future business of Hfe.
Compare, for example, the ambush and
pounce of the kitten, the ardent chase and
overthrow of the puppy, and the chmbing
prochvities of the kid. As a general rule,
in proportion as an animal is capable of
becoming intelligent, and as long as it is so
capable, it is inclined to sport. A cat
loses the desire early in life,
Pla Fits it ^ ^^^ retains it to the end.
r ^Ti. r^/ A child's play, therefore,
for the Future • ■ t .• r
IS no mdication of mere
frivolity. It is the outward and visible sign
of an eager and splendidly directed mental
activity. Curiosity also prompts the child
to store its memory. Imitativeness impels
him to acquire those mental traits which
enabled his progenitors to survive in their
world. Parental love prompts to the care
and instruction of offspring. Very illu-
minating and beautiful is the instinctive
delight of some dull and careworn mother
in babyish play with her infant, and
her joy when it first "takes notice," and
in its earliest beginnings of speech and
locomotion.
Every animal species is fitted by its
structures and their associated faculties
to its particular place in Nature. In some
cases it holds its own largely through the
evolution of some one structure or group
of structures. Thus, the bat is especially
distinguished by the great development
of its fingers and of the web between
them, and the elephant by its trunk.
The principal distinguishing physical pecu-
liarity of man is the enormous relative
size in him of that upper part of the verte-
brate brain which is termed the cerebrum,
and, we have every reason to believe,
constitutes the organ of memory and
thought.
Associated in a special way with his
great brain are his organs of speech and
manipulation. These three structures, the
brain, the vocal apparatus, and the hand,
undoubtedly underwent concurrent evolu-
tion by the constant survival,
during a period of intense com-
petition, of those individuals
who were naturally the best
capable of receiving and storing experience,
of using it for the intelligent manipulation
of objects, and of communicating it to
their fellows and descendants through the
medium of speech. Even the highest of the
lower animals are able to learn from one
another only by example or through such
very elementary verbal signs as calls,
Evolution
of Man's
Powers
growls, or cries of alarm, which express no
more than simple emotions.
Their traditional knowledge, therefore,
is as nothing compared with that of
man, who by means of articulated speech
communicates not only information con-
cerning sense impressions and emotions,
but complex items of knowledge and
processes of thought which have been
garnered, elaborated, and systematised
during tens of thousands of years by
millions of predecessors. Without speech,
or some such method of communicating
abstruse information, his great brain would
be useless. But knowledge and powers of
thought are of no avail unless they can be
translated into action ; and for this the
hands are necessary. To set free the fore
limbs, which had hitherto been organs of
locomotion, for their new function of
manipulation, man became a biped, and
assumed the erect posture — by no conscious
effort, however, but solely by the survival
of the fittest in each generation.
Savage man, then, differs from the lower
animals in that he has a larger brain, a
more capacious memory, and greater
p powers of utilising and commu-
Jj!"'^*''" nicating its contents. Modern
IS ay o ^^^ differs from ancient man
because he is the heir of longer
experience. Civilised man differs from the
savage chiefly in that he has invented and
more or less perfected certain artiC-cial
aids to speech, written symbols by means of
which he is able to store in an available
form knowledge immensely more abstruse
and voluminous than would otherwise be
possible. His books are artificial memories
and vehicles of communication of un-
limited capacity and unerring accuracy.
Moreover, by means of these symbols
he is able, as in the mathematics, to per-
form feats of thinking quite beyond the
powers of his unaided mind ; just as by
means of machinery and other mechanical
contrivances he is able to perform physical
feats beyond the unaided powers of his
body.
To memory, then, is due the advance of
the savage beyond the lower animal ; to
tradition, the child of memory, the advance
of modern man beyond ancient man ; to
tradition stored in books the advance of
civilised men beyond the savage. To
written symbols are due also man's vast
powers for future advance. The brute,
the mammoth, the mastodon, the whale,
the elephant, and the tiger, became ever
III
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
more and more helpless in the presence
of a knowledge and an mgenuity that
gathered with the rolling years, and,
though accumulated for ages, were yet
relati\'ely new things in this enormously
old world.
Low animals, in proportion as they lack
memory, move in a narrow, instinctive
groove. Their mental traits are all in-
herited, and therefore each individual
follows exactly in the footsteps of its pre-
decessor. Since they cannot learn, they
cannot adapt themselves to circumstances.
Removed from the ancestral environment
they perish. Cast in a rigid, inexpansive
mould, every individual resembles every
other of the same species, as much mentally
as physically.
It is different Vv'ith man. He is pre-
eminently the educable, the reflective,
the adaptive animal. Since the experi-
ences of no two men are quite similar,
they differ in knowledge, ideas, and
aspi ations, and, therefore, none are very
closely alike mentally. The child does not
follow exactly in the footsteps of the
parent. So great is human adaptability
that, though the mind of the
an can savage differs immensely in all
Revert to j ■ ^- • j ' r
„ except instmct and power of
avagcry learning from that of the civil-
ised man, yet, were the child of the latter
trained from birth by the former, he could
not be other than a savage.
On the other hand, utter savages — for
example, the Macries of New Zealand —
have passed in a single generation from
barbarism to civilisation. The average
individual amongst us may be trained to
fill the role of a beggar or a king, a scientist
or a monk, a thief or a legislator. He is
able to dwell in ihe Tropics or in the Arctic,
in the town or in the wild. Memory, know-
ledge, intelligence, adaptability, are all
links in a single chain of efficiency.
Memory is of two sorts, conscious and
unconscious. The conscious memory
contains experiences which can be re-
collected, such as the words of a language
or the sights we have seen. The uncon-
scious memory contains impressions which
cannot be recalled to mind, but which
are none the less important. Thus, we
learn to use our limbs, a process which
involves a precise but quite unconscious
adjustment of the actions of numerous
nerves and muscles, the very names and
existences of which are known only to the
anatomist. So, also, in youth we uncon-
IT2
Dawn of
Human
Life
sciously imitate our fellows, adopting in
great measure their mental tones and
attitudes without knowing how or when
we were influenced. Much, too, that was
once capable of being recalled is added to
that hidden store, and, though apparently
lost, remains potent for good or evil. Our
minds are like floating icebergs, of which
the visible part is but a frac-
tion of the whole, and are
moved by deep currents in a
seemingly unaccountable way.
At birth Ihe mind of a child, unlike that
of a beetle, is practically blank. Sights and
sounds and the other feelings convey
no meanings to it. But soon the messages
sent by the sensation are understood.
In a few weeks the child evolves order out
of chaos, and comprehends to a wonderful
degree the world around it. It learns to
move its muscles in a purposeful way, and
in a year or two is able to walk and sj^eak a
language, and do a vast deal more besides.
In these early years, the period of man's
greatest mental activity, are made his
most valuable and indispensable acquire-
ments. But as he becomes more and more
completely equipped for the battle of life,
his powers of adding to the store slowly
decline. In adult life the gains are balanced
by the losses. In old age the losses exceed
the gains. Compare the perfection with
which the young acquire the manners of
society, and every accent, inflection, and
intonation of a language, with the im-
perfections displayed when learning is
undertaken later.
We learn to do new things, acquire new
knowledge, and think new thoughts with
toil. But practice brings facility. In the
end we perform with ease that which was
acquired with difficulty. We cannot,
however, unlearn as we learnt, by an act of
will. The facihty lingers, and, as a con-
sequence, our actions and thoughts, our
mental attitudes, our whole outlook on
life becomes more or less automatic and
„ , . stereotyped. In other words,
Habits arc • , , i ;
, . ,. our acquirements come at last
Imitation , ui • i. .l i
, ,. ^ to resemble instmcts, and are
Instincts r. 11
often so misnamed, as when a
boy who has learned to dodge is said to
avoid a blow instinctively. A being from
another planet who for the first time saw
a man walking or cycling could not distin-
guish the nature of these acquirements from
such instinctive movements as the running
or flying of an insect. The patriotism of a
Spartan or a Japanese differs from that of
HOW MAN OBTAINED THE MASTERY OF THE EARTH
a bee only in its mode of origin. In brief,
the low animal is a creature of instincts,
the man is a creature of habits, which are
nothing other than imitation instincts.
A principal function, then, of our faculty
of making mental acquirements, of our
conscious and unconscious memories, is to
supply us with .those automatic ways of
„ , . ., thinking and acting which are
Mankind s u i.-^ ^ r .l .l
c k *•. . our substitutes tor instmcts.
oubstitutes r\
f I .. , Uur conscious memories sup-
lor Instinct , .,, , , ^ ,
ply us with our stereotyped
mental attitudes — desires, beliefs, aspira-
tions, habitual way of thinking, and so
forth. Our unconscious memories supply
our stereotyped ways of acting — the auto-
matic ways of acting we have just con-
sidered. It is a principal business of our
lives to acquire them ; but, though a great
advantage is thus gained, one almost as
great is lost. We act and think more
quickly in familiar situations, but in pro-
portion as we grow older we lose our
splendid human capacity for learning.
Beyond the verge of our imitation instincts
spreads a domain, very wide in the infant,
but narrowing as we pass towards old age,
which is the real realm of the active
intellect. Here, where thoughts and actions
are not yet stereotyped, memory gathers
fresh harvests, imagination plays, and
reason ponders. Here man is a rational
being in the strict sense of the word.
A little thought renders it evident that
a feeble-minded person, an idiot, or an im-
becile, is always one with a defective
memory. He is unable to profit like the
normal individual from experience. The
truth that the higher faculties are more
often absent in the feeble-minded than
the lower is due entirely to the fact that
they can be acquired only by people
whose receptive powers are well developed.
In effect and in fact the feeble-minded
person is an instance of reversion to a
prehuman mental state. Judged by the
human standard, every monkey is an
idiot. But the reversion is
*^ not complete, for, though the
„ imbecile loses some part of his
Memory . r .■ ^
power 01 profiting by experi-
ence, he regains no part of the lost power
of being guided by instinct. Therefore
he is correspondingly helpless as com-
pared with a lower animal.
Owing to the constitution of the human
mind, some decay of the faculty of profiting
by experience accompanies advancing age.
But it need seldom be so great as it usually
• 8
is, and never so great as it often is. Cer-
tain mental attitudes, certain systems of
education, certain environments, leave
the mind of the man almost as open as
that of a little child ; others inflict on it
premature senility. An Aristotle or a
Darwin learns to the last year of his long
life ; a Mohammedan or a Tibetan ecclesias-
tic is old before he has ceased to be young.
Convinced that pestilence is due directly
to the wrath of God, he scorns the notion
that sanitation can be right or useful ;
believing that the earth is fiat, no evidence
will convince him that it is round ; holding
his sacred religion with a steadfast faith,
he will murder the heretic rather than think
out his propositions.
But habits of stupidity are not confined
to particular regions of thought. Becoming
almost as incapable of mental change as
a beetle, a man may undergo an arrest of
mental development which differs from
that of the idiot only because it occurs
later in life, is less complete, and is
acquired, not innate. In his ordinary
surroundings he appears a normal person ;
but placed among people of more open
mind, his brute-like inability
t^M°^j ^ to learn suggests sharply the
Minds of , , °° , , , ^r-^ , ,
w ¥>•« resemblance to the feeble-
Men Differ . .
minded child. Let us sum up.
Man has conquered the earth because he
is pre-eminently the educable, the adap-
tive animal. His educability — indeed, his
whole thinking capacity — depends on
his memory. He has few instincts, a
fact which increases his mental ductility ;
but one of the most important of his
instincts is imitativeness, which impels
him to copy not only such obvious
things as the speech of his predecessors,
but their mental attitudes as well. In
this way not only the actual knowledge
and beliefs but also the habits of thought
of one generation are handed on to the
next. Apart from a few instincts which are
more active in the child than in the adult,
and two or three others whose appearance
is deferred till later life, the whole mental
difference between the child and the adult
lies in the fact that the former has a great
memory in the sense that it is very capable
of storing experience, whereas the latter
has a great memory in the sense that it has
already stored much experience. As parent
to child, so one racial generation hands
on its acquirements to the next, but with
greater certainty ; for the parent is not
the only influence in the life of the child,
113
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
who imitates many other people, some-
times more closely than the parent ;
whereas, since few individuals travel
during youth, the young are seldom
influenced by others than by members of
their own race. Except in times of great
change, therefore, racial generations re-
semble one another even more closely than
parents and children.
Like individuals, races differ in their
mental characteristics. The English have
one set of characters, the Japanese another,
and the Russians a third. The problem
of the extent to which these characters
are inborn or acquired is very important
to the student of history. Accordingly
as we believe they are the one or the
other we are driven to accept one or other
of two very different readings of the past.
Are races, then, brave or cowardly,
energetic or slothful, enlightened or
savage, and so forth, by nature or by
training ? Are the qualities that have
enabled some races to flourish, while
others are decadent, transmitted as
instincts or handed on, as knowledge is ?
The reader has now materials of a kind
, „ not usually found in historical
Influences , i,- i. j. r j
/^k-ij- works on which to found a
in & Child s • J i TT J. 1^
Life judgment. He must bear m
mind that, while an American
infant reared by cannibals would retain
the bodily characteristics of his race
mentally, he could not be other than
a savage. He must remember also that
some races have altered their mental
characteristics very rapidly. Thus, in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, immedi-
ately after the long Dark Ages, the
British and several other Euroj:)ean races
suddenly became intellectually active
and socially progressive. The Japanese
supply a more modern, the Greeks and
Romans more ancient, instances. The
latter quite as suddenly sank into abysmal
degradation. Innate mental characters,
such as the instincts, usually change so
slowly that not merely historical but geo-
logical time elapses before the alteration is
perceptible. Again, the reader must note
that, while the opinion that racial traits
are inborn is nearly universal, most men
act as if they knew them to be acquired ;
for nearly all men are careful in training
their children, especially with respect to
those traits that contribute to the for-
mation of character.
Doubtless, races of men differ innately
in mind as they do in body, but these
114
differences can o ci '• only within narrow
limits. The instiiicls of all races are, of
course, very similar, for all the instincts
are essential to the preservation of hfe.
But races may differ in strength of
instinct, and more especially in powers of
memory. Thus it is possible, or probable,
that the Englisji, for example, are more
capable of profiting by ex-
'"^* perience than Australian blacks.
acts to Certainly, their brains are
™ ™ "^ larger. On the other hand, the
brain grows under the stimulus of use, and
therefore the larger size of the English
brain may be due to more arduous labour.
Lastly, the reader must ask himself the
question : What mental effects have
centuries of freedom or slavery, or of
civilisation, or of barbarism, on races ?
Do they produce innate changes, or do
they merely render certain acquirements
so nearly universal that their perpetuation
by imitation is insured ? If he supposes
that the changes are innate, he must ask
himself the additional question whether
they arose through the transmission of
parental acquirements to offspring, or
through the actua' and constant destruc-
tion in certain environments of certain
definite types of individuals who were
thus prevented from leaving offspring and
so perpetuating their like. The former
hypothesis is now generally repudiated by
science. The latter may be true, but as
yet has not been supported by evidence ;
or at any rate is supported only by such
evidence as that which Mill and Buckle
denounced. In either case, though history
may furnish him with intellectual occupa-
tion, it will supply few lessons of practical
value. If, on the other hand, he has
perceived the greatness of the part played .
in the human mind by acquirement, if he
has noted that man is man, a thinking
and rational being, the conqueror of the
earth, only because he is the most im-
pressionable and therefore the most
_ adaptable of hving types, the
a ue o racial see-saw of the past what
>s ory kinds of mental training have
conduced to success and happiness and
what to ruin, and so perhaps he may find
himself in a position to help the fortunes
of his people and his children. The real
value of history, as in the last analysis
of all experience, lies in its educational
applications.
G. Archdall Reid
PREHISTORIC MEN ATTACKING THE GREAT CAVE BEARS
M^N
AND
ISTORY
THE WORLD BEFORE HISTORY
By Professor Johannes Ranke
THE WONDERFUL STORY OF DRIFT AAN
THE history of the world is the history
of the human mind. The oldest
documents affording us knowledge of it
lie buried in those most mighty and
comprehensive historical archives, the
geological strata of our planet. Natural
philosophy has learned to read these
stained, crumpled, and much-torn pages
, that record the habitation of
a urc s ^^^ earth by living beings ; but
Great Book , r . ■ r .iT- u i
. „. only a tew sections of this book
""^ of the universe have yet been
perused, and these appear but frag-
mentary in comparison with the whole
task. The passages that relate to the
human race are small in number and often
even ambiguous, and it is only the last
pages that can give an account of it.
The oldest undisputed traces of the
presence of man on the earth that have
hitherto been discovered are met with in
the strata of the Drift Epoch, and it is
only during the last generation that the
'existence of " Drift Man " has been
palaeontologically proved beyond dispute.
The late Sir J. Prestwick believed, how-
ever— and his results have been confirmed
by later discoveries — in the existence of
evidence of the presence of man in
Western Europe before the present
river system of our land was established,
long before the age of the " Drift " relics.
The evidence consists of rudely shaped
pieces of flint, apparently artificially
chipped along one or more edges. These
supposed implements are termed " Eoliths."
They were first discovered by Mr.
Benjamin Harrison in the high-level
plateau, probably of the Upper Pliocene
Age, in Kent, and their significance is
now widely accepted.
Up to the middle of last century research
appeared to have established as a positive
fact that man could not be traced back to
the older geological strata ; remains of
man were said to be found only in the
newest stratum of the earth's formation —
in the alluvial, or " recent " stratum. The
bones of man were accordingly claimed to
be sure guides to the geological formations
of the present time, as the bones of the
mammoth and cave-bear were to the strata
of the Drift. Where traces of man were
found it was considered as proved by
natural science that the particular stratum
in which they occurred was to be allotted
to the most recent system, which we see
forming and being transformed under our
eyes at the present day.
While it was declared that man belonged
to the alluvial stratum, it was at the same
time stated, according to the doctrine of
Cuvier, which had the weight
of Naturar °^ ^ dogma, that man could
o * *"■* ^qi have belonged to an older
Catastrophes , . , "
geological stratum or era,
and therefore not even to the next older
one, the Drift. The beginning and the end
of geological eras are marked by mighty
transformations which have caused a local
interruption in the formation of the strata
of the earth's surface. In many cases we
can point to volcanic eruptions as the
chief causes, but more especially to a
115
History of the world
change in the distribution of land and
water. Cuvier had conceived these changes
involving the transformation to have been
violent terrestrial revolutions, the col-
lapse of all existing things, in which all
living beings belonging to the past epoch
must have been annihilated. It appeared
impossible that a living thing could have
survived this hypothetical battle of the
elements, and passed from an older epoch
into the next one ; and the new epoch was
supposed to have received plants and
animals by re-creation. All this had to be
applied to man also ; he was supposed to
A PAGE FROM NATURES HISTORY BOOK
It is in the successive layers of the earth's strata with
their human and animal remains that we read the story
of the past. Embedded in the earth itself we have
the existence of " Drift Man " established. Our illus-
tration is that of a section of the famous Kent's Cavern,
near Torquay, which is rich in prehistoric remains.
have come into existence only in the
alluvial period. Not without consideration
for the Mosaic account of the Creation,
which, like the creation legends of numer-
ous peoples scattered far and wide over all
the continents of the earth, tells of a great
deluge at the beginning of the present
age, the Pleistocene Epoch of the earth's
formation preceding the present period had
been termed the Flood Epoch, or Diluvium.
In its stratifications it was thought that
the effects of great deluges could largely
be recognised ; but the human eye could
not have beheld these, for, according to
ii6
the catastrophe theory, it appeared out of
the question that man could have been
" witness of the Flood."
Here modern research in the primeval
history or palaeontology of mankind begins,
starting from the complete transformation
of the doctrine of the geological epochs
brought about by Lyell and his school.
Proofs of terrestrial revolu-
. * tions, as local phenomena and
c ua y epoch marks, are doubtless to
Happened i r i • • i j.
be found, imposing enough to
make the views of the older school appear
intehigible ; but, generally speaking, a
complete interruption of the existing con-
ditions did not take place between the
periods. Everything tends to prove that
even in the earlier eras the transforma-
tion of the earth's surface went on in prac-
tically the same way as we see it going on
before our eyes to-day in a degree that is
slight only to appearance. The effects of
volcanic action ; the rising and sinking of
continents and islands, and the alteration
in the distribution of sea and land caused
thereby ; the inroads of the sea and its
work in the destruction of coasts ; the
formation of deltas and the overflowing of
rivers ; the action of glaciers and torrents
in the mountains, and so forth, are con-
stantly working, more or less, at the
transformation of the earth's surface.
As we see these newest alluvial deposits
being formed, so in principle have the
strata of the earlier eras also been
formed, and their miles of thickness prove,
not the violence of extreme and sudden
catastrophes, but only the length of time
that was necessary to remove such mighty
masses here and pile them up there. It
was not sudden general revolutions of
great violence, but the slowly working
forces, small only to appearance, well
known from our present-day surroundings,
which destroy in one place and build up
again in another with the material ob-
tained from the destruction — it was these
which were the causes of the
gradual transformation of the
earth in all periods of its his-
tory comparable to the jiresent.
According to this new concej^tion of
geological processes, a general destruction
of plants and animals at the end of eras,
and a new creation at the beginning
of the following ones, was no longer a
postulate of science as it had been. The
living creatures of the earliest eras could
now be claimed as ancestors of those
Nature's
Unbroken
Chain
This indicates a vast stretch of the lost land of England, looking towards the Scilly Isles from Land's End. All
between the broken lines was once land as far as Scilly, thirty miles away and fifty miles thence to Lizard Point.
/.-Vyr- g
-'iiijroi.K /
1
i
::■ ./
' "-■?
' .1
It/i'U^'a'Si
In old maps Bavent was for- The coast of England is being slowly worn away by the sea. In many places
merly the most easterly point of houses have been swallowed up. Here we see the disintegrating process going
England; now that is Lowestoft, on at Holderness, where the sea front presented this appearance after a gale.
SLOW INFLUENCES THAT DESTROY IN ONE PLACE AND BUILD UP IN ANOTJIER
The coming of the sea over the land is so slow as to be almost imperceptible, but these pictures illustrate its pro-
gress. The pictures in the upper half of the page show how the sea is encroaching on the coast ; the opposite result
is shown in the bottom view from Reigate Hill, where we see an ancient arm of the sea now a rich and populous valley.
117
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
living to-day ; the chain
seems nowhere com-
pletely broken. The an-
cestors of the human race
were also to be sought in
the strata of the earher
geological periods.
Among the forces
which we find attended
by a transformation of
the fauna and flora of
the earth's eras, the in-
fluences of climatic
changes in particular are
clearly and surely shown.
In that primeval period
in which the coal group
was formed the chmate
in widely different parts
of the earth was com-
paratively equable, little
divided into zones, and
of a moist warmth ; this
is proved by the really
gigantic masses of plant
growth implied by the
formation of many coal
strata, in which the
remains of a luxuriant
cryptogamic flora are
everywhere embedded.
In Greenland, in the
strata belonging to the
chalk period, and even
in the deposits of the
Tertiary Period, which
immediately precedes the
Drift Era, the remains
of higher dicotyledonous
plants of tropical charac-
ter are found. The
occurrence of palaeozoic
coral reefs in high lati-
tudes also goes to prove
that the temperature of
the sea water there was higher at that
time : in fact, that a tropical climate
existed in the farthest north — an extreme
contrast to the present ice-sheet on its
land and the icebergs of its seas.
In Central Europe the climatic conditions
can have been only slightly different. During
the middle Tertiary Period palms grew in
Switzerland ; and even at the end of the
Tertiary Period, as it was slowly passing
into the Drift Era, the climate in Central
Europe was still warmer than now, being
much like that of Northern Italy, and its
protected west coast the Riviera. There
ii8
EUROPE BEFORE THE BRITISH ISLES WERE FORMED
This map and section illustrate the coast line of Prehistoric Europe when
the British Isles were part of the Continent and the North Sea did not
exist. The black parts of the section were all above the level of the Atlantic.
was also a rich flora, partly evergreen, and
a fauna adapted to such mild surroundings.
Even in the oldest (Preglacial) strata, and
again in the middle (Interglacial) strata
of the Central European drift, there was
still an abundant plant-growth requiring
a temperate climate, at any rate not more
severe than Central Europe possesses at
the present day. Our chief forest trees
grew even then — the pine, fir, larch, and
yew, and also the oak, maple, birch, hazel,
etc. On the other hand. Northern and
Alpine forms are absent among the plants.
The same holds good of the animal
THE WONDERFUL STORY OF DRIFT MAN
THE SUBMERGED LANDS OF EUROPE
This map and section show how the Continental shelf of Europe runs out
to the Atlantic, and how enormous is the area now submerged in the com-
paratively shallow water of the North Sea, the Irish Sea, and the Channel.
world, which was certainly much farther
removed than the plant world from the
conditions prevailing now. The gigantic
forms — the elephant, rhinoceros, and hip-
popotamus— appear particularly strange
to us, as also the large beasts of prey —
the hyena, lion, etc. But besides these, and
the giant deer with its powerful antlers, and
two large bovine species — the bison and
the urus — there were also the majority
of the present wild animals of Central
and Northern Europe that were originally
natives — as the horse, stag, roe, wild boar,
and beaver, with the smaller rodents and
insectivora, ai.i the
wolf, fox, lynx, and
bears, of which last
the cave-bear was fai
larger than the present
brown bear, and even
than the Polar and
grizzly bears.
We have sure proofs
that through a decrease
in the yearly temper-
ature a glacial period set
in over Europe, North
Asia, and North
America, burying vast
areas under a sheet of
ice, of the effect and
extent of which North-
ern Greenland, with its
ground-relief veiled in
inland ice, can give us
an idea.
The immediate conse-
quence of this total
climatic change was an
essential change in the
fauna. Forms that were
not suited to the dete-
riorated climate, that
could neither stand it
nor adapt themselves to
it, were first compelled
to retire, and then were
exterminated. This fate
befell the hippopota-
muses, and also one of
the two elephant species,
Elephas antiquus, with
its dwarf breeds in Sicily
and Malta, probably
thus developed by this
retreat; then the
rhinoceros - like Elas-
motherium, a species of
beaver ; the Trogon-
therimn, and the powerful cat Machairodtis
or Trucifelis, which still lived in England,
France, and Liguria during the Drift
Period. Other animals, like the lion and
hyena, withdrew to more southerly regions,
not affected by the increasing cold and
more remote from its effects.
On the other hand, according to Von
Zittel's description, an immigration of
cold-loving land animals took place, which
at the present day live either in the Far
North or on the wild Asiatic steppes, or in
the high mountam ranges. These new
immigrants mixed with the surviving forms
119
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
of the older drift fauna. The latter lived,
as we have seen, by no means in a warm
cHmate, but only in a temperate " nor-
therly " one, even in the warmer periods
of the epoch. So we can understand that
many of this older animal community were
well able to adapt themselves to colder
climatic conditions, and among them two
of the large Drift pachydermata,
_ f. ^^ the elephant and rhinoceros,
Anim&Is
whose kin we now find only
in the warmest climes. But a
thick woolly coat made these two Drift
animals well fitted to defy a raw climate —
namely, the woolly-haired mammoth, Ele-
phas primigenius, one of the two Drift
species of elephants of Europe, and the
woolly-haired rhinoceros. Rhinoceros anti-
qnitatis. A second species of rhinoceros,
Rhifioceros merckii, was also preserved,
and maintained its region of distribution.
The horse was now more largely distri-
buted, and inhabited the plains in herds ;
but, above all, the reindeer immigrated
along with other animals that now belong
only to Far Northern and Arctic regions,
and pastured in large herds at the edges of
the glaciers. With the reindeer, although
less frequent, was the musk-ox of the Far
North, besides many other cold-loving
species, such as the lemming, snow-mouse,
glutton, ermine, and Arctic fox. Many of
the animal forms that were very frequent
then, in the Drift Period, appear now in
Central Europe only as Alpine dwellers,
living on the borders of eternal snow, such
as the ibex, chamois, marmot, and Alpine
hare.
Of special importance for our main
question is the great invasion of Europe
by Central Asiatic animals ; immigrants
direct from the Asiatic steppes pushed
westward " as in a migration of nations,"
among them the wild ass, saiga antelope,
bobac, Asiatic porcupine, zizel, jumping
mouse, whistling hare, and musk shrew-
^. . . , mouse. According as the gla-
Thc Animal a ■ ^ a ■
ciers and mland ice grew or
,r shrank, the animals of the
of Europe i ■ i • j ^ ^
glacial period advanced more
or less far to the North or retired more
to the South, extending or reducing
their range of distribution. The Gla-
cial Period was no invariable climatic
phenomenon. It is perfectly certain that
a first Glacial Period with a low yearly
temperature, under the influence of which
the ice-masses, with their moraines, ad-
vanced a long way from the North and
120
from the high mountains, so that in
Germany, for instance, only a compara-
tively narrow strip remained free and
habitable for higher forms of life between
the two opposing rivers of ice — was suc-
ceeded by at least one period of warmer
climate, and that certainly not a short
one. The mean yearly temperature had
increased so much that the ice-masses
melted to a considerable extent, and had
to retire far to the North and into the high
valleys of the Alps. In this warmer inter-
glacial Period, as it is called, the Drift
animals advanced far to the North, es-
pecially the mammoth, which, with the
exception of the greater part of Scan-
dinavia and Finland (districts which
remained covered with ice during the Inter-
glacial Period), is distributed throughout
the drift strata of the whole of Europe
and North Africa, and as far as Lake
Baikal and the Caspian Sea in Northern
Asia. Even the older Drift fauna, so far
as it had not yet died out or retired,
returned to its old habitats, so that Ihe
Interglacial fauna of Central Europe ap-
pear very similar to the Preglacial fauna.
A long-sustained decrease of
f fK I ^^^^ temperature led once more to
A ^cv^ ^^^ growth of the ice, which in
gc ima e ^^.^ second Glacial Period
almost reconquered the territory it had
won at first.
In consequence of these oscillations in
the chmatic conditions of the Drift Era
as a whole, we have to distinguish the
Preglacial Era and the Interglacial Era,
as warmer sub-periods of the Drift,
from the real Glacial Periods. The latter
appear as a first, or earlier, and a second,
or later Glacial Period, as remains of
which the zone of the older moraines and
the zone of the later ones clearly mark
the limits of the former glaciation.
It was this second deterioration of the
climate, with the fresh advances made
by the glaciers and masses of inland ice,
which definitely did away with the older
Drift fauna that was not equal to the
sudden climatic change. Nor did the
woolly-haired rhinoceros, the Rhinoceros
merckii, and the cave-bear survive the
climax of the new Glacial Period. Even the
woolly-haired mammoth succumbed. It
and the woolly-haired rhinoceros, accom-
panied by the musk-ox and bison, had
made their way into the Far North of Asia.
But while the two last species bore the
inclemencies of the climate, the rhino-
The Ibex The Man ot
TYPES OF ANIMALS SURVIVING IN CENTRAL EUROPE FROM THE DRIFT PERIOD
Manv of the animal forms that were very frequent in the Drift Period appear now in Central Europe only as
Alpme dwellers iTvUg on the borders of eternal snow. Such ai 2 the ibex, chamois, marmot, and Alpme hare.
ceroses and elephants met their end here.
And yet they had long preserved their
hves on the borders of eternal ice. Whole
carcases, both of the woolly-haired and
Merckian rhinoceroses, and also of the
woolly-haired mammoth, the bison, and
the musk-ox, with skin and hair and well-
preserved soft parts, have been discovered
in the ice and frozen ground between the
Yenisei and Lena, and on the New
Siberian Islands at the mouth of the
Lena. The carcases of the mammoth
and rhinoceros found imbedded in the ice
were covered with a coat of thick woolly
hair and reddish-brown bristles ten inches
long ; about thirty pounds of hair from
such a mammoth were placed in the St.
Petersburg Natural History Museum. A
mane hung from the animal's neck almost
to its knees, and on its head was soft hair
a yard long. The animals were therefore
in this respect well equipped for enduring
a cold climate. As regards their food they
were also adapted to a cold climate, traces
121
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Breaking
up of
the Earth
of coniferae and willows-^ that is, " Northern
plants " — having been found in the hollows
of the molar teeth of mammoths and
rhinoceroses. The mammoth proves to
have had greater resisting power, and to
have been more fit for further migrations,
than the rhinoceros. The latter's range
of distribution extended over the whole
of Northern and Temperate
Europe, China and Central Asia,
and Northern Asia and Siberia.
But, as we have seen, the mam-
moth penetrated not only into North Africa,
but, what is of the highest importance for
the proper understanding of the settling of
the New World, even into North America.
The connection which in earlier geo-
logical periods had united Europe, Asia,
Africa, and North America in the greatest
homogeneous zoogeographical kingdom,
the Arctogaea, was broken during the
Tertiary and Drift Periods, so that several
zoogeographical provinces were formed.
The connection with North America was
the first to be broken, so that even in the
last two divisions of the Tertiary Period,
the Miocene and Pliocene Epochs, the Old
and the New Worlds stood in the relation
of independent zoogeographical provinces
to one another. Now, it is of the greatest
importance to note that during the Drift
Period North America again received some
Northern immigrants from the Old World,
according to Von Zittel " probably via
Eastern Asia." Consequently, during the
Drift Period communication existed, at
least temporarily, between Asia and North
America in the region of Bering Strait,
sufficient to allow the mammoth and
some companions to migrate from the one
continent to the other. In Kotzebue
Sound mammoth remains are found in the
" ground-ice formation," together with
those of the horse, elk, reindeer, musk-ox
and bison. Mammoth remains are also
known to have been found in the Bering
Islands, St. George in the Pribylov group,
_ . and Unalaska, one of the
^°j7/"'°'*" Aleutian Islands. In that
^ . period the mammoth arrived in
the New World as a colonist
driven from the Old. It spread widely over
British North America, Alaska, and
Canada ; it has also been found in Ken-
tucky. A relatively recent union of the
circumpolar regions of the Northern Hemi-
sphere— of Europe, Asia, and North
America — is also proved by the occurrence
of animals that we recognise as companions
122
of the mammoth, but which, surviving the
Glacial Period, are still distributed over the
whole region, such as the reindeer, elk, and
bison. The absence in Asia of several
animals specially characteristic of the
European Drift (the hippopotamus, ibex,
chamois, fallow-dear, wildcat, and cave-
bear) explains also their absence in the
North American Drift fauna. It is par-
ticularly strange that the cave-bear did not
reach Northern Asia. It is otherwise the
most frequent beast of prey of the Drift
Period, and hundreds of its carcases often
lie buried in the caves and clefts it once
inhabited. In Southern Russia numerous
remains of it are found, whereas in the
English caves it is rarer, the cave-hyena
predominating here. Apart from the
exceptions just mentioned, J. F. Brandt
considers North Asia and the high Northern
latitudes to be the region in which the
European, North Asiatic, and North
American land fauna had concentrated
during the Tertiary and Drift Periods, and
whence their migrations and advances
took place according as it grew older. As
the northern fauna spread over more
southern latitudes during
ArrTv"I° ^^® ^'"'^^ Period, they took
• ""p^* possession of the habitats
urope ^^ ^-^^ species there belong-
ing to the Tertiary Period, drove them
back into tropical and subtropical regions,
and formed the real stock of the Drift
fauna, as described by Von Zittel in his
" Palasozoology."
One thing is certain — namely, that the
northern borders of Siberia were not the
real home of the mammoth and its com-
panions ; the original habitat of these
animals points to the far interior of Asia,
particularly to the wild table-lands, where
they so far steeled themselves in enduring
the climate that in the course of the Glacial
Period half the world became accessible
to them. As far as is known to-day, the
mammoth arrived in Europe earlier than
on the northern borders of Asia, where,
protected by climatic conditions, its
remains are most numerous and best
preserved. The number of these gigantic
animals must have been very considerable
in this Far Northern region for a time,
judging from the abundance of bones
found there. In Central Europe only a few
places are known — such as Kannstatt
Predmost in Moravia, etc. — where the
mammoth is found with similar frequency.
The mammoth attained its widest dis-
AN ACTUAL PHOTOGRAPH OF THE PREHISTORIC MAMMOTH
This stuffed carcase of a mammoth is the rarest treasure of St. Petersburg Academy. Skeletons of these
creatures exist in plenty, but actual carcases are very rare. This was found embedded in the ice on the New
Siberian Islands. One carcase so embedded was discovered five years before it could be freed from the ice.
tribution in the Interglacial Period. In
that period it crossed the Alps, and arrived
on the other side, in North Asia, at the
border of the " stone-ice " masses of inland
ice that were still
preserved from the
first Glacial Period.
The vegetation there
was richer then than
it is to-day ; now
only the vegetation
of the tundra can
exist. Animals found
coniferae, willows,
and alders in suffi-
cient quantity to
enable them to keep
in herds. All the
same, we have not
to imagine the cli-
mate on the borders
of the ice to have skeleton of
been " genial," for
from that period originate the mammoth
carcases that are found frozen entire in
crevasses of the ice-fields. When the new
period of cold — the second Glacial Period —
joegan. these Far Northern regions must
in the Natural History Museum, South Kensing^ton.
have become unsuitable for the mammoth
owing to the want of food. Von Toll, who
has examined the fossil ice-beds and,
their relation to the mammoth carcases
particularly on New
Siberian Islands, says:
The mammoths and
their contemporaries
Uved where tfieir re-
mains are found ; they
died out gradually
in consequence of
physical geographical
changes in tlie region
they inhabited, and
through no catas-
trophe ; their carcases
were deposited dur-
ing low temperatures,
partly on the river-
terraces, and partly on
the banks of lakes or
on glaciers (inland ice),
and covered with mud ;
like the ice-masses that
formed the foundation of their graves, their
mummies were preserved to the present day,
thanks to the persistent or increasing cold.
The woolly-haired mammoth did not
survive the second Glacial Period
-123
A MAMMOTH
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
anjAvhere ; in the post-Glacial Period its
traces have disappeared.
The Drift series of strata are nowhere so
clearly exemplified as in the New Siberian
Islands, where the Drift stone-ice still
forms very extensive high " ice-cliffs,"
always covered with a layer of loam, sand,
and peat, and having precipices often
of great height — in one place seventy-
two feet.
Embedded in these cliffs of stone-
ice have been found the mammoth car-
cases, which formerly sank into crevices
in the ice. These crevices are partly
filled up with snow,
which has turned into
" firn " and finally
into ice, but partly
also with loam or
sand, which are
merged above imme-
diately into the strata
overlying the stone-
ire. In the year
i860 Bojavski, the
mammoth- hunter,
found a mammoth,
with all its soft parts
preserved, sticking
upright in a crevice
in the ice filled with
loam ; in 1863 it was
thrown down, to-
gether with the coast-
wall that sheltered it,
and washed away by
the sea.
The Tunguse Schu-
machow had been
fortunate
more
as
SURVIVOR OF THE DRIFT PERIOD
<^irlTr etc T'rrvn T^nririrr Only one representative of the great Drift fauna, the
t-clliy db 1799. i^UIlIlg n,„sk-ox, has been able to preserve its life to the
his boating expedi
on to the sand of the coast. Here Adams
found the carcase in 1806, or as much as the
dogs and wild animals had left of it. The
whole skeleton, with a portion of the flesh,
skin, and hair, has since formed one of
the chief ornaments of the collection in the
Academy at St. Petersburg. According
to Von Toll, who personally visited the
site of Bojavski's discovery, the following
profile presented itself there : first the
tundra stratum ; then an alternation of
thin strata of loam and ice ; under these
a peat-like layer of grass, leaves, and
other vegetation, that had been washed
together ; then a fine
layer of sand, with
remains of Salix, etc.,
and finally stone-ice.
At another place, in
Gulf Anabar, in 73°
north latitude, Von
ToH also found the
ground-moraine un-
der a fossil ice-bed,
which appears to
jirove his theory of a
Drift region of inland
ice, of which the
stone-ice beds of New
Siberia and Esch-
scholtz Bay are re-
mains.
Of these strata the
frozen loam deposits
over the stone-ice,
containing the wil-
low and the alder,
are doubtless Inter-
glacial. Some of the
remains of the alder
are in such wonder-
tions along the coast,
on the look-out for mammoth-tusks, he
observed one day, between blocks of ice,
a shapeless block which was not at all
like the masses of driftwood that are
generally found there. In the following
year the block had melted a little, but it
was only at the end of the third summer
that the whole side and one of the tusks
of a mammoth appeared plainly out of the
ice ; the animal, however, still remained
sunk in the ice-masses. At last, towards
the end of the fifth year, the ice between
the ground and the mammoth melted
more quickly than the rest, the base
began to slope, and the enormous mass,
impelled by its own weight, glided down
124
present day on the larger remnants of its former ful preservation that
vast home, such as Greenland and Grinnell Land. ,i i-n i
there are still leaves
and whole clusters of catkins on the
branches.
The land-mass to which the present
New Siberian Islands belong was only
dismembered at the end of the Inter-
glacial Period, when colder sea-currents
procured an entrance, and the accumula-
tion of snow-masses diminished simul-
taneously with the sinking of the land,
whereas the cold increased. The flora
died off, says Von Toll, and the animal
world was deprived of the possibility of
roaming freely over vast areas. Only
one representative of the great Drift fauna,
the musk-ox, has been able to preserve its
life to the present day on the larger
TH£ WONDERFUL STORY OF DRIFT MAN
Remains
of the
Ice Age
remnants of its former vast home, such as
Greenland and Grinnell Land.
As we have said, the geological and
climatic conditions in all regions of the
earth affected by the Glacial Period were
closely similar to those just described.
In other places the Drift stone-ice has long
disappeared, but the ground-moraines of
the former inland ice-masses,
and the surface-moraines (ter-
minal and lateral) of the former
gigantic glaciers, constitute its
unobliterated traces. On the moraines
of the earlier Glacial Period we find the
strata of the Interglacial Period deposited,
and on the later moraines of the second
(last) Glacial Period lie the remains of the
post-Glacial Period, in the course of which
a continual increase in the yearly tempera-
ture— probably only a few degrees of the
thermometer — caused the glaciers to melt
and retreat, and opened the way for the
return of plants and animals to what had
been deserts of snow and ice. The place
formerly occupied by the Interglacial
and Glacial fauna is then taken by the
post-Glacial fauna, which proves consider-
ably different.
A number of the most characteristic
species of the former sections of the Drift
Period are already absent in the earliest
post-Glacial deposits ; the fauna approaches
nearer and nearer in its composition to
that of the present day. The inland ice-
masses and gigantic glaciers began to melt
away, and gradually retired to the present
limits of the glaciation that forms the
remains of the Glacial Period of the Drift.
The animal forms of the beginning of the
post-Glacial Period are still living, and the
plants characterising this final stage of
the Drift Period are still growing on the
borders of the ice at the present day. In the
post-Glacial Period a few Northern forms —
such as the reindeer, lemming, ringed lem-
ming, glutton, zizel, whistling hare, and
jumping mouse — still retained for a time
their habitats in Central Europe. Part
of the Drift fauna — as the horse, wild ass,
saiga antelope, and Asiatic porcupine
— concentrated again in the Asiatic
steppes, from which they had formerly
won their territory of the Drift Period;
the specific Glacial forms — the reindeer
and his above-mentioned companions —
followed the retreating ice-masses into
the Far North, and even into Polar regions.
Another part — the specially Alpine forms,
such as the ibex, chamois, marmot, and
Alpine hare — migrated with the Alpine
glaciers into the high valleys of ihe Alps,
where they could continue the life they had
led in the lowlands during the (jlacial
Period. The mammoth, woolly-haired
rhinoceros, and cave-bear are extinct.
The present-day mammalian fauna of
Europe and North Asia accordingly bears
a comparatively young character ; during
the Drift, and especially in consequence of
the Glacial Period, it underwent the most
considerable transformations.
It is in the middle of this great drama
_ . of a gigantic animal world
ommg o struggling and fighting for its
Man upon oo o .., °, °
,. c existence with the superior
powers of Nature, during the
Interglacial period of the Drift, that man
suddenly appears upon the scene in Europe
like a dens ex machina.
Whence he came we do not know.
Did he make his entrance into Europe
in company with the Drift fauna that im-
migrated from Central Asia, or have we to
seek his original home in the New World ?
125
B/io/vrosAunvs
MAMMOTH
,^ ^S^.
ir- .. ICHTHYOSAURUS
PLSsiosAunus
C2f2BC223ff*
THE FIRST TENANTS OF THE WORLD: CREATURES THAT LIVED BEFORE MAN
This page represents the most typical of the giant creatures that inhabited the world before man. With possibly one
exception, they had disappeared before man came and, through long centuries, slowly won dominion over the earth.
126
THE WORLD
BEFORE
HISTORY— II
Professor
JOHANNES
RANKE
THE APPEARANCE OF MAN ON THE EARTH
T
HE remains of the Drift fauna are
usually found mixed up and washed
together in caves and rock-crevices. From
the investigation of the caves inThuringia,
Franconia, and elsewhere practically pro-
ceeded the first knowledge of the Drift
fauna of Central Europe. Here, right
among the bones of primeval animals,
were also found bones and skulls of man.
The strata in which they were discovered
appeared undisturbed ; that they came
into the old burial-places of the Drift
fauna subsequently— perhaps by an inten-
tional burial of relatively recent times-
was thought to be out of the question.
The discovery that became most famous
was Esper's, in one of the richest caves
of " Franconian Switzerland," the Gail-
lenreuth cave. There, in 1774, Esper found
a man's lower jaw and shoulder-blade
at a perfectly untouched spot protected
by a stone projection in the cave wall,
in the same loam as bones
The Mystery ^^ ^-^e cave-bear and other
°^ * _ „ Drift animals. Later, a human
Human Skull ^^^^^ ^- ^^ ^^^^ ^^^g potsherds
of clay came to light in another place.
Esper argued thus :
As the human bones (lower jaw and
shoulder-blade) lav among the skeletons of
animals, of which the Gaillenreuth caves are
full and as they were found in what is in all
probability the original stratum, I presume,
and I think not without sufficient reason,
that these human limbs are of equal age
with the other animal fossils.
The Cuvier catastrophe theory could not
allow this inference ; according to that
theory it was a " scientific postulate "
that man could not have appeared on the
earth until the alluvial period, and there-
fore after the Drift fauna had become
extinct. Therefore, in spite of appearances,
the human bones must have been more
recent ; and it was indeed absolutely
proved that the skull that Esper had
found in the cave with the rude clay pot-
sherds originated from a burial in the
floor of the cave. As this was full of
remains of Drift animals, the corpse, which
had been covered with the earth that had
been thrown up in digging the grave, was
necessarily surrounded by these remains,
and even appeared embedded in them.
It was ascertained that in very early
times, but yet long after the Drift Period,
the dwellers near by had had a predi-
lection for using the caves as burial-
places, so that the fact of human bones
coming together with bones
The Story ^^ j)j.-f^ animals in the floor
°' of the same cave is easily ex-
the Caves p^^^j^g^j Moreover, it was found
that from the earliest times down to the
present day the caves had been used by
hunters, herdsmen, and others as places
of shelter in bad weather, as cooking-
places, and sometimes even — especially
in very early times— as regular dwelling-
places for longer periods, so that refuse of
all kinds, and often of all ages and forms
of civilisation that the land has seen from
the Drift Period down to modern times,
must have got into the floors of the caves.
If these were damp and soft, the remains
of every century were trodden in and got
to lie deeper and deeper, so that, for
instance, the fragments of a cast-iron
saucepan were actually found right among
the bones of regular Drift animals in a
cave in Upper Franconia.
The discoveries of human remains in
caves appeared discredited by this, and to
be of no value as proofs of the co-existence
of man with the Drift fauna. And indeed
this position must practically be still
taken at the present day : all cave -finds
are to be judged with the greatest cau-
tion. They in themselves would never have
" been sufficient to estabUsh
The Caves ^^^ existence of Drift Man,
do not Prove ^j^j^Q^g^^ according to the
Drift Man ^^^^^^^ change in scientific
thought that led to the overthrow of
Cuvier's theory. Drift Man is now just as
much a postulate of science as was for-
merly the case for the opposite assumption.
The first sure proofs were adduced in
France by Boucher de Perthes, in the
Drift beds of the Somme valley, near
Abbeville, at the end of the third decade
127
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
of the nineteenth century. Fully recog-
nising the inadequacy of proof given by
cave-finds, he had sought for the relics
of man in the undisturbed Drift beds of
gravel and coarse sand that contains the
bones of Drift animals, which by their
covering and depth precluded all suspicion
of having been subsequently dug over.
_. ,. ,. And he was successful. He had
Finding the , • ^i ^u
* argued m exactly the same man-
d' 'ft M "^^ '^^ Esper had formerly done,
but with better right. In the
stratified Drift formations every period is
sharply defined by the layers of differently
coloured and differently composed strata
horizontally overlying one another. Here
the proofs begin. They are irrefutable if
it is shown that the relics of man have been
there since the deposit. Being no less immo-
vable than this stratum in which they lie, as
they came with it, they were likewise pre-
served with it ; and as they have contribu-
ted to its formation, they existed before it.
That is the line of thought according
to which Boucher de Perthes was able,
in 1839, to lay before the leading experts
in Paris — at their head Cuvier himself —
his discoveries proving the former exist-
ence of Drift man. But his demonstra-
tions were not then sufficient to break the
old ban of prejudices that were apparently
founded on such good scientific bases ;
his proofs of the presence of man in the
Somme valley at the time of the Drift,
contemporaneously with the extinct Drift
animals, were ridiculed. It was twenty
years before these long-neglected dis-
coveries in the Somme valley concerning the
early history of man were recognised by
the scientific world. This was only made
possible by Lyell, whose authority as a
geologist had risen above Cuvier's, placing
the whole weight of it on Boucher's
side, after having personally travelled
over the Somme valley three times in the
year 1859, ^^'^ having himself examined
all the chief places where relics of Drift
_. _, ,. Man had been discovered.
The Overthrow . ,• . r ii> i
- ^ . , Accordmg to Lyell s de-
of Cuvier s • i- ^i r- ,i
Famous Theory fcript'on, the Somme valley
lies m a district of white
chalk, which forms elevations of several
hundred feet in height. If we ascend to
this height we find ourselves on an exten-
sive tableland, showing only moderate
elevations and depressions, and covered
uninterruptedly for miles with loam and
brick earth about five feet thick and quite
devoid of fossils. Here and there on the
128
chalk may be noticed outlying patches of
Tertiary sand and clay, the remains of a
once extensive formation, the denudation
of which has chiefly furnished the Drift
gravel material in which the relics of man
and the bones of extinct animals lie buried.
The Drift alluvial deposit of the Scmme
valley exhibits nothing extraordinary in
its stratification or outward appearance,
nor in its composition or organic contents.
The stratum in which the bones of the
Drift fauna are found intermingled with
the relics of man is partly a marine and
partly a fluviatile deposit. The human
relics in particular are mostly buried deep
in the gravel ; almost everjrvvhere one has
to pass down through a mass of overlying
loam with land shells, or a fine sand with
fresh-water molluscs, before coming to
beds of gravel, in which the rehcs of
Drift Man are found.
Everything shows that the relics of man
are here in a secondary situs, deposited
in the same way as the bones of extinct
animals and the whole geological ma-
terial in which everything is embedded.
That is the reason why the finds cannot
be more exactly dated. They
doubtless belong to the general
drift, but whether to the Post-
glacial Period, or the warmer
Interglacial Period, cannot be decided. The
fauna admits of no absolute limitation,
owing to its being mixed from both periods.
The mammalia most frequently found in
the strata in question are the mammoth,
Siberian rhinoceros, horse, reindeer, ure-
ox, giant fallow-deer, cave-lion, and cave-
hyena. In very similar Drift deposits of
the Somme near Amiens traces of man
were found beside the bones of the hippo-
potamus and the elephant.
These animals were chiefly prevalent
in France and Germany in the Preglacial
and Interglacial Periods of the Drift.
Part of the animal remains found
near Abbeville, particularly those of
the cave-lion and cave-hyena, also point
to the warmer Interglacial Period ;
on the other hand, the mammoth,
Siberian rhinoceros, and especially the
reindeer, appear to indicate with all cer-
tainty the second Glacial and Postglacial
Periods. The bones of the older Drift
animals may have been washed out of
other primary situs : the reindeer had
certainly already taken possession of those
parts of France when the relics of man
were embedded.
Animals
of the
Ice Age
THE APPEARANCE OF MAN ON THE EARTH
In spite of the most eager search for
similar reUc-beds affording sure evidence of
Drift Man, only a very few have as yet
been discovered that can be placed by
the side of those in the Somme valley.
Two are in Germany, and are the more
valuable as a more exact date can be
given to them within the Drift Period.
One is near Taubach
(Weimar), the other
at the source of the
Schussen. The one
at Taubach belongs
to the Interglacial
Period, that at the
source of the Schussen
to the Postglacial
Period. The former
lies on the moraines
of the iirst Glacial
Period, which was
followed by the Inter-
glacial Period ; the
latter on the moraines
given by the conditions of stratification.
In the rich fauna found there, animals
indicating a cold climate are entirely
absent, and a comparison of the whole of
the finds proves that at the time when
man was present there no kind of arctic
conditions can have prevailed. There
is no reindeer, no lemming. The roe,
stag, wolf, brown bear,
beaver, wild boar, and
aurochs were at that
time inhabitants of
these regions, and the
only inference they
allow is that of a tem-
perate climate. The
mollusc fauna, in which
also all Glacial forms
are absent, also leads to
the same conclusion ;
all that occur are
familiar to us from
those of the present
day in the same
Cuvier Boucher De Perthes
THE OVERTHROW OF A FAMOUS THEORY OF THE ORIGIN OF THE EARTH AND MAN
When Cuvier was supreme among' geologists his theory that the great geological ages ended with sudden catastrophes
which annihilated all life, and that all life was then created afresh, was universally accepted. One result of this theory
was the disbelief in the existence of man before the Glacial Age. Boucher de Perthes sought to establish the former
existence of Drift Man on finding human relics in the Somme Valley ; but not until Sir Charles Lyell threw his influence on
the side of De Perthes was the Preglacial existence of man admitted, and the long-accepted theory of Cuvier overthrown.
of the second Glacial Period, which slowly
pa.ssed into the Postglacial Period.
The Drift relic-bed in the calc-tufa near
Taubach lies, as we have said, over the
remains of the first Glacial Period, and
according to Penck, one of the best
authorities on the Drift, belongs to the
warmer intermediate epoch between the
two great periods of glaciation. The
proofs given by the plant and animal
remains agree entirely with the proofs
district. The fauna would really
appear quite modern were it not that a
very ancient stamp is imparted to it by
several extinct types. With the modern
animals enumerated are associated the
cave-lion, cave-hyena, ure-elephant, and
Merckian rhinoceros, characterising the
whole deposit as a distinctly Drift one,
which is still further proved stratigra-
phically by the covering of " loess." The
Taubach relic-bed is a typical illustration
129
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
of the climatic and biological conditions
of the warmer Interglacial Period ; the
regions of Central Europe, which had been
covered with masses of ice in the first
Glacial Period, had, after the ice melted,
become once more accessible to the
banished plants and animals of the
Preglacial Period, until they were annihi-
lated, or at least driven de-
c ima c ^j-jj|-gjy fj-om their old habitats
I A ^y ^^^ second Glacial Period.
The celebrated relic-bed at
the source of the Schussen, near Schussen-
ried, at a little distance from Ulm, brings us
— in strong contrast toTaubach — into quite
glacial surroundings. It was on the glacier-
moraines of the last great glaciation, and
belongs, therefore, to that period which
must still be reckoned as part of the Drift — -
the Postglacial Period, which gradually
passed into the warmer present period.
Under the tufa and peat at the source of
the Schussen we find the type of a purely
northern climate, with exclusively northern
flora and fauna ; everything corresponds
to climatic conditions such as prevail
nowadays on the borders of eternal snow
and ice, or begin at 70° north latitude.
Schimper, one of the best authorities on
mosses at the present day, found among
the plant-remains under the tufa at the
source of the Schussen only mosses of
northern or high Alpine forms. Among
them was a moss brought from Lap-
land by Wahlenberg, which, according
to Schimper, occurs in Norway near
the chalets on the Dovrefjeld, on the
borders of eternal snow, and also in
Greenland, Labrador, and Canada, and on
the highest summits of the Tyrolese Alps
and the Sudetic Mountains. It has a
special preference for the pools in which
the water of the snow and glaciers flows off
with its fine sand. There were also found
mosses which have now emigrated to cold
regions, to Greenland and the Alps. The
most numerous animals were the reindeer,
and yellow and Arctic foxes,
ora an ^^ distinctly Arctic forms ; and
th "i A there were also the brown bear
and wolf, a small ox, the hare,
the large-headed wild horse— which always
occurs in the Drift as the companion of
the reindeer — and, lastly, the whistling
swan, which now breeds in SjMtzbcrgen
or Lapland. There is an absence of all the
present animal forms of Upper Swabia, as
well as of the extinct Drift animals, either
of which would indicate a warmer climate.
130
More decided climatic or biological con-
trasts than those afforded by the relic-
beds at Taubach and the source of the
Schussen could not be imagined ; here we
have with certainty two perfectly different
periods before us, but both belonging to the
general Drift Era.
Although almost all the other places
where Drift Man has been found exhibit
peculiarities, Taubach and the source of
the Schussen seem the best representatives
of the two chief types in Europe. Places
giving better proof have not yet come to
light anywhere in the Old World.
At first sight the palaeontological strata
of South America, in which the presence of
man has been proved by Ameghino, appear
to give a very different picture. The ani-
mal forms occurring here contemporane-
ously with man deviate to such an extent
from those familiar to us in the Drift of the
Old World that it required the keen eye
and the complete grasp of the whole
palasontological material of the world that
characterise Von Zittel to recognise and
establish the connections here, while the
discoverer himself thought that he must
. date his discoveries of man
r ^* e ^i back to the Tertiary Period.
from South ^^ , . i • 1 ^^i
. . the strata m which the
America i- ^ . r
earliest traces of man as
yet appear to be proved in South America
are the extensive " loess-like " loam
deposits of the so-called " pampas "
formation in Argentina and Uruguay,
with their almost incomparable wealth of
animal remains, particularly conspicuous
among which are gigantic representatives
of edentates that now occur only in small
species in South America : Glyptodontia
(with the gigantic Glyptodon reticulatinn)
and dasypoda ; also of the gravigrada, the
giant sloth (Megatherium amcricanum).
The toxodontia were also large animals,
now extinct. But besides the specifically
South American forms, numerous " North
American immigrants " also appear in the
pampas formation. It was only at the close
of the Tertiary Period that the southern and
northern halves of America grew together
into one continent, and the faunae of North
and South America, so characteristically
different, then began to intermingle with
one another. The South American autoch-
thons migrate northward ; on the other
hand. North American types — as the horse,
deer, tapir, mastodon, Felis, Cants, etc. —
use the newly-opened passage to extend
their range of distribution. The northern
REVEALING THE UNKNOWN LIFE OF THE PREHISTORIC PAST
A section of the earth, representing excavators in the act of disc^ermg the remams^ o^^^^^^^^ m a cave
in the Sonth of England. Our iUustration is reproduced from Bucklands Reliquiae Uiluvianae,
London, 1822.
animal forms are very conspicuous among
the animal world of South America, hither-
to cut off from North America and charac-
terised by the above-mentioned wonderful
and, in part, gigantic edentates, marsupials,
platyrhine apes, etc. Of the great ele-
phantine animals of North America only
the mastodon crossed over to South
America. In the middle and latest Ter-
tiary formations the genus mastodon is
widely distributed over Europe, North
Africa, and South Asia. In North America
the oldest species of the mastodon appear
in the Middle Tertiary (Upper Miocene),
but the most species are found in the latest
Tertiary (Pliocene) and the Drift (Pleisto-
cene) ; in South America the mastodon
is limited to the time of the pampas forma-
tion. Its tusks are long and straight, or
slightly curved upward ; its lower jaw also
possesses two tusks, which project in a
straight direction, bu^" are considerably
less than the upper tusks in size. From the
results of Ameghino's investigations man
appears to have come to South America
with these northern immigrants, especi-
ally with the mastodon. In Ameghino's
lists of the animals of the pampas forma-
tion Von Zittel describes man. like the
animal forms enumerated above, as an
immigrant from North America, and as
a noithern type.
According to Von Zittel's statements
there is no longer any doubt that the
pampas formation, and with it early
man, of South America, is to be assigned
to the Drift Era ; he sums up the case
in these words :
In South Asia and South America the
Tertiary Period is followed by Drift faunae,
which in the main are composed of species
still existing at the present day, but yet
show somewhat closer relations to their
Tertiary predecessors.
131
THE WORLD
BEFORE
HISTORY— III
^^^^
^
Professor
JOHANNES
RANKE
THE LIFE OF AAN IN THE STONE AGE
""THE oldest remains affording us know-
•*■ ledge of man are not parts of his
body — not the skeleton from which, in the
case of primeval animals, we have learned
to reconstruct their frame — but evidences
of the human mind. Until the discoveries of
Boucher de Perthes turned the scale, search
had been made in vain among the bones of
the fossil fauna for remains of the skeleton
of fossil man of undoubtedly the same age ;
it was not bones, but tools, by which the
Abbeville antiquary proved that man had
been a " witness of the Flood " in Europe ;
tools which taught irrefutably
that the mental powers of fossil
Man a
Witness of
the Flood
man of the Drift were similar
in kind to, if possibly less in
degree than, those of living members of
mankind. The Drift tools prove that,
even in that early epoch to which we
have learned from Boucher to trace him
back, man was distinctively man.
Boucher de Perthes was an expert archae-
ologist, and he knew that in Europe, in
a very early period of civilisation, men had
made their tools and weapons of stone,
as many tribes and races in a backward
state of civilisation — for example in South
America, the South Sea Islands, and
many other places — do at the present day.
These stone implements are practically
indestructible, and from ancient times
manifold superstitions have attached to
the curious articles that the peasant turns
up out of the earth in ploughing. Such
stone weapons were called lightning-stones
by the Romans, as they are bj' country-
folk at the })resent day. Scientific archcTe-
ology occupied itself with them at an early
date. In 1778 Buffon declared the so-
called lightning-stones, or thunder-stones,
to be the oldest art-j^roductions of prime-
val man, and as early as 1734, Mahudel
and Mercati had pronounced them to
be the weapons of antediluvian man. Such
views determined the line of thought
in Boucher's researches. From the very
lieginning he sought, in the undisturbed
Drift beds of his home, not so much for the
bones of Drift Man as for his tools, which
he suspected to be of the form of the
132
lightning-stones, although he knew that,
so far as was hitherto known, these be-
longed to a very much later epoch — that
is, specially to the Alluvial or " Recent "
Period.
His expectations were crowned with
success. Deep below the mass of over-
lying loam and sand, right in the strata
of gravel and coarse sand, he found stone
tools, which without the slightest doubt
had been worked by the hand of man for
definite and easily recognisable purposes
as implements and weapons. Although to
a certain extent ruder, they are practically
the same forms as the tools, weapons,
and implements of stone that we see
in use among so-called " savages " of the
present day. It is the tool artificially
prepared for a certain purpose that raises
man above the animal world to-day, as
it did in the time of the Drift.
Upon his first visit to the relic-beds near
Abbeville in the spring of 1859, Lyell
had obtained seventy specimens of these
stone tools from the chief of them. The
tools were all of flint, which occurs in
abundance in the chalk of the district, and
is still obtained and worked for technical
purposes at the present day. The worked
stones that Boucher found were termed
flint or silex tools, according to the ma-
terial of which they were made. They
occurred in the particular beds, as Lyell
expressed it, in wonderful quan-
Drift Man's
titles.
_,. „. . ..v.^... The famous geologist
Tliree Kinds j- , • • i j . i i ■ r r
J. ™ . distinguished three chief forms.
The first is the spear-head form,
and varies in length from six to eight
inches. The second is the oval form, not
unlike many stone implements and weapons
that are still used as axes and toma-
hawks at the present day — for instance,
by the aborigines of Australia. The
only difference is that the edge of the
Australian stone axes, like that of the
European implements of later periods of
civilisation known as thunderbolts or
lightning-stones, is mostly ])roduced by
grinding, whereas on the stone axes from
the drift of the Somme valley it has always
been obtained by simply chipping the
THE LIFE OF MAN IN THE STONE AGE
Stone, and by repeated, skilfully directed
blows. According to Tylor the stone im-
plements of the old Tasmanians were
entirely of Drift form and make, all with-
out traces of grinding, being simply angu-
lar stones whose cutting-edge had been
sharpened by being worked with a second
stone. Some of these stone implements
of Drift Man may have been
simply used in the hand when
the natural form of the stone
offered a convenient end, but
the majority were certainly fastened in
a handle in some way or other, to serve
as weapons— spear-heads or daggers—
both for war and the chase. Lyell's
The Chief
Forms
of Tools
large number of very rude specimens
have also been found, of which many may
have been thrown away as spoiled in the
making, and others may have been only
rubbish produced in the working. Evans
has practically proved that it is possible
to produce such stone implements in
their remarkable agreement of form with-
out the use of metal hammers. He made a
stone hammer by fastening a flint in a
wooden handle, and worked another piece
of flint with this until it had assumed the
shape of the axe form— the second, oval
form— of the Drift implements.
Lyell draws attention to the fact that,
in spite of the relatively great frequency
HOW PREHISTORIC MANKIND IS REVEALED ^ ■ j .u
Most of our knowledge of the earliest life of man has been revealed by the excavator. When at a certain depth
second chief form would have been used
as an axe for such purposes as digging up
roots, felling trees, and hollowing out
canoes, or to cut holes in the ice for fishing
and forgetting drinking water in the winter.
In the hand of the hunter and warrior
the stone axe also became a weapon. As
the third form of stone implements Lyell
distinguished knife-shaped flakes, some
pointed, others of oval form or trimmed
evenly at one end, obviously intended
partly as knives and arrow-heads, and
partly as scrapers for technical purposes.
Although there are many variations
between the first two chief forms, yet the
typical difference indicating the different
purpose of their use is always easily
recognised in well-finished examples. A
of stone implements, it would be a great
mistake to rely on finding a single specimen,
even if one occupied himself for weeks
together in examining the Somme valley.
Only a few lay on the surface, the rest not
coming to light until after removing
enormous masses of sand, loam, and gravel.
As we may presume with Lyell that the
larger number of the Drift
stone implements of Abbeville
Lyell's Find
in the
Somme Valley
and Amiens were brought into
their position by the action
of the river, this sufficiently explains why
so many were found at great depths below
the surface ; for they must naturally have
been buried in the gravel with the
other stones in places where the stream
had still sufacient force or rapidity to
133
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
THE
Making an axehead of flint, like that photographed on
the opposite page. From the painting by F. Cormon.
wash stones away. They can, therefore,
not be found in deposits from still water,
in fine sediment and overflow mud.
Bones of Drift Man are absent from the
deposits of the Somme valley, in spite o
the wonderful abundance of stone im-
l)lements. The " lower jaw from Moulin-
Ouignon, near Abbeville," had been
fraudulently placed there by workmen.
But proof of the existence of man is
undeniably assured by the objects, so
un[)retentious in themselves, that have
been recognised as the work of his hands.
When once the recognition of Drift
]\hm, founded on the authority of Lyell,
was achieved, search for further relic-
beds was made in England and France
with success. Yet scarcely one of the
newly discovered stations was to be
compared to those of the Somme valley
as regards purity of stratification and
conditions of discovery. The relics of
the " earliest Stone Age " or " Palaeo-
lithic Period," as the period of Drift
Man was called, frequently came from
caves and grottos, whose primary conclu-
siveness Boucher had rightly doubted.
Under these circumstances it was of
the greatest importance that in Ger-
many Drift Man was discovered in two
places, where not only was the geologi-
cal stratification just as clear as at
Abbeville and Amiens, but where also
the relics of Drift Man were found, not
in a secondary situs, as they were then,
but in a primary one. In addition to
this the two German relic-beds may be
safely assigned to the last two great
divisions of the Drift Period, to the
warmer Interglacial Period, and to the
cold Glacial Period proper, with its Post-
glacial Period ; and their climatic condi-
tions were made clear from the remains
of i^lants and animals found in them.
From the occurrence, in the deposits of
the Somme, of reindeer that contain the
stone implements of Drift Man, we can
not, as we saw, exactly settle in what
part of the Drift Era man lived there,
whether in the Interglacial Period, to
which numerous animal remains found
there doubtless belong, or not until the
" Reindeer" Period, as the last Glacial
and early Postglacial Periods were called,
when the reindeer was most largely
distributed over France and Central
Europe. One is inclined to date man's
habitation of the Somme valley back to
the Interglacial Period ; but it is certain
134
THE LIFE OF MAN IN THE STONE AGE
that the relic-bed near Taubachis the first,
and, as far as I can see, the only one
hitherto, that has given sure proof of Inter-
glacial Man in Europe. There the oldest
vestiges of man in Europe were found that
have yet been absolutely proved. We have
not hitherto succeeded in Europe in
tracing man farther back than the Inter-
glacial Period. Relics of him are hitherto
as absent in the
older Drift as
they are in the
Tertiary.
The Taubach
r e 1 i c-b e d also
furnished n o
bones of Drift
Man among all
the parts of
skeletons of Drift
animals that we
have mentioned.
Here, too, as in
the Somme val-
ley, the proof of
the presence of
man is based on
the works of his
hand and mind.
Here, too, stone
implements and
stone weapons
are the chief
things 1 o be
mentioned. But
whereas, in the
chalk district of
France, flints of
every size were
to be had in the
greatest abun-
dance for the
preparation of
weapons and
tools, corre-
sponding stones
are not exactly
wanting at the
two standard ^ workman's tool
German places, p,i„t implement found in Gray's Ini
though they oc-
cur in limited number and size. It is due
to this that the larger forms of flint imple-
ments, which are most in evidence in the
Somme valley, are absent at Taubach. On
the other hand, smaller "knives and
flakes "— Lyell's third form of Drift flint
implements — occur here with comparative
frequency and variety of form. Next to
the usual lancet-shaped knife, worked
flint flakes, of triangular prismatic form,
with sharp corners, are most numerous at
Taubach, and scrapers, chisels, awls, and
the chipping-stones with which the stone
implements were produced may also be
distinguished among other things. The
material for the implements was supplied
by the older Drift debris of the valley —
namely, flint.
•■*'*>>
flinty slate, and
quartz porphyry.
Besides the
stone imple-
ments which
alone were ob-
served in the
Somme valley,
still further im-
portant relics
were found here
in their primary
s i t u s. Above
all, numerous
finds of charcoal
and burnt bones
prove that the
Drift Men of
Taubach not
only knew how
to kindle fire, but
were also accus-
tomed to roast
the flesh of the
animals they
killed in the
chase. Stones
and pieces of
shell limestone
also occur which
have become
reddish and hard
from the action
of heat. These
are to be re-
garded . as the
floors and side-
walls of the fire-
places on which
the food was
then and there
prepared. The animal bones, especially
those that were taken up from around
the fireplace, appear in most cases
to be remains of meals. This is shown
at once by the fact that bones of young
representatives of the large beasts of
the chase — such as the rhinoceros, ele-
phant, and bear — are very frequent as
135
IN THE STONE AGE
London ; now in British Museum,
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
compared with the rare occurrence of
full-grown animals.
It appears that in the hunting and
capture of animals the young ones were
most easily killed, and therefore served
chiefly as food. Whenever a large animal
was killed, it was probably cut up on the
spot by the fortunate hunters, who
consumed at once part of its
flesh ; the trunk was then left
g . at the scene of the killing,
while the head, neck, and fore
and hind legs, on which was the most
muscular flesh, and which were at the
same time easier to carry away, were
taken to the settlement. This may explain
why, among the many large bones of the
rhinoceros that have hitherto been found,
the ribs and the dorsal and lumbar
vertebrae are almost entirely absent.
Some of the bones of the beasts of the
chase bear the unmistakable traces of
man. They are broken in the manner
characteristic of " savages " of all ages
and climes — for the sake of the marrow,
one of the greatest dainties of men living
chiefly on animal fare. The broken-oft"
heads of the metatarsal bones of the
bison still show particularly clearly the
method of breaking. They are broken
off transversely exactly where the marrow
canal ends, and on all these bones there
is a roundish depression, or hole, at the
same place — namely, in the middle of their
front or back surface, and just where
the end of the marrow canal is, therefore
about in the centre of the break of the
broken-off i^ece. The hole is a " blow-
mark " of one inch in diameter, evidently
driven in by force from without, as several
well-preserved specimens still show the
edges and splinters of bone j^ressed
inward. These sj)linters and all the
breaks are old, and have on the surface
the same greasy coating, full of the sand
in which tlu-y lay, as the bones themselves.
The instrument used for breaking the
•J «,.,»* bones in this way might very
How Drift Man ,, , , .11
. .,, . .. well nave been the lower
Killed the , , V.1 i 1
/- . A • 1 jaw of a bear with its large
Great Animals ■"•,,, <--. ,- "
canine tooth, as Oscar I^raas
has ascertained to have been the case in
other places where Drift Man has been
found. Such lower jaws were found at
Taubach, and the nature and size of
the hole and its edges agree with this
assumj)tion. The long bones of the
elephant and rhinoceros were whole.
Drift Man did not succeed in breaking
136
these huge pieces, and where such bones
are found broken they are accidental
fractures. On the other hand, almost
all bones of the bear and bison are inten-
tionally split — in almost all cases trans-
versely, and seldom lengthways.
In the Somme valley we have only the
flint implements — which, although rude,
are very regularly and uniformly made
for different recognisable purposes — to
tell us of the life and state of Drift Man ;
but the finds at Taubach afford us a rather
closer insight into the conditions of his
life and culture. What we had suspected
from the first finds is confirmed here.
During the Interglacial Period we see
near Taubach, on the old watercourse
of the Ilm, which had there at that time
become dammed up into a kind of pond,
a human settlement. This was occupied
for a long period, as is proved by the
large number of bones, evidently remains
of meals, and by the quantity of charcoal.
Immediately on the bank were the fire-
places— rude hearths built of the stones
obtained without trouble in the neigh-
bourhood. Here the flesh of the beasts
of the chase, the bison and
the bear, and also the elephant
and rhinoceros, was broiled in a
crude manner in the hot ashes,
as is still done by savages on the level
of the Fuegians and primitive tribes of
Central Brazil at the present day. For
this no utensils are required, a sharjiened
rod or thin pointed stick being sufficient
for turning and taking out the pieces of
meat. The ashes that the gravy causes
to adhere su})ply the place of salt and
other seasoning. The meat was cut up
with the stone knives, and many traces
of cuts on the bones may also be attri-
butable to these instruments. For cutting
out larger ]iortions a powerful and very
suitable instrument was at hand, in the
lower jaw of the bear, with its strong
canine tooth, which also serv^ed for break-
ing bones to obtain the marrow. In
spite of the apparent meanness of the
weapons, remains of which we have found,
the Drift Men of Taubach were yet able,
as their kitchen refuse })roves, not only
to kill the bison and bear, but also the
gigantic ele|)hant and rhinoceros, both
young and full grown.
This shows man to have been then, as
he is to-day, master even of the gigantic
animal forms which so far surpass him
in mechanical strength. It is the mind
Drift Man
at
his Meals
WEAPONS OF THE CHASE USED BY PREHISTORIC MAN
A collection of neolithic lance and arrow heads found in Ireland, now to be seen in the British Museum.
of man that shows itself superior to the
most powerful brute force, even where
we meet him for the first time. From
the finds in the Somme valley it appears
that Drift Man already possessed spear,
dagger, and axe, besides the knife, as
weapons. There the blades were of stone.
The relatively small blades of the Taubach
stone implements are, it is true, of the
same character as the stone implements
of Abbeville and Amiens, but they are
chiefly, as we have said, merely knife-
like articles, very suitable as blades for
knives, scrapers, and daggers, and as
arrow-heads, but not strong enough as
T» -rx m. hunting-weapons for such big
Drift Man ° -ru i. j. j. ±v.
game. Ihe hunt must, there-
*!. u * fore, have been more a matter
the Hunt r , ., , ,
of capture m pits and traps, as
practised at the present day where similar
large types of animals are hunted by
tribes armed only with defective weapons.
The kitchen refuse also proves that the
settlement by the Ilm pond, near Taubach,
was a permanent one, to which the hunters
returned after their expeditions, bringing
their game and trophies so far as they
were easily transj)ortable. But there is
no trace of domestic animals. They could
not have completely disappeared, any
more than remains of clay vessels, which
are still less destructible than bones, and
in this respect may be compared to stone
138
implements. There was no trace of pot-
sherds either.
The finds in the Somme valley and near
Taubach are of incalculable importance
as sure, indisputable proofs of Drift Man
in Europe ; but as regards the wealth
of information to be derived from them
respecting man's psychical condition in
that first period in which we can prove
his existence, they are far and away
surpassed by the find at the source of
the Schussen, which Oscar Fraas, the
celebrated geologist, has personally in-
ventoried and described. Fraas has
rightly given to his description of this find
of Glacial Man — the most
The Best , , J 1 -
"Find" fth i™Po^tant and best exam
Ice Age
ined hitherto — the title "Con-
tributions to the History of
Civilisation During the Glacial Period." .
The geognostic stratification of the
relic-bed on one of the farthest advanced
moraines of the Upper Swabian plateau
proves that it belongs to the Glacial Period,
and that this had already pushed its
glacier-moraines to the farthest limit ever
reached. In point of time the finds
are, therefore, to be placed at the end
of the Glacial Period, as it was passing
into the Postglacial Period ; everything
still points to Far Northern conditions
of life. The finds at the source of the
Schussen are thus decidedly more recent,
IMPLEMENTS OF THE STONE AGE AND THEIR MAKING
The methods of holding a hammer-stone and of making a flint by pressure are illustrated at the top, those of usine
a chopping: tool at the bottom, of this plate. The other objects are spear-heads, axes, and hammers of stone
and Hmt, and javehn-heads of horn, the latter being smooth and barbed. The method of tying a flint chisel
to a wooden handle is shown at the right (x). Most of these objects are to be seen in the British Museum.
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
geologically, than those made at Taubach.
They are a typical, or, better, the typical
example of the so-called " Reindeer Period"
of the end of the Drift.
From Fraas's description there seems
to be no doubt whatever that the relic-
bed, with its remains of civilisation, was
perfectly undisturbed, and its palseonto-
logical contents plainly show
its great geological age. It was
perfectly protected by Nature.
On the top lies peat, the same
that covers the lowlands of the
whole neighbourhood for miles,
and forms the extensive moor-
lands of Upper Swabia, on which
)io other formations are to be
seen than the gravel drift-walls
hundred square yards in extent, and only
four to five feet deep in the purest glacier
drift, clearly showing that the excellent
preservation of the bones and bone imple-
ments was solely due to the water having
remained in the moss and sand. The bank
of moss was like a saturated sponge ; it
closed up its contents hermetically from
the air, and preserved in its
ever-damp bosom what had
been entrusted to it thousands
of years before.
Under the peat and tufa at
the source of the Schussen we
find only the type of a
purely Northern climate, with
Northern flora and Northern
fauna. There are no remains
of domestic animals — not
throwri up by glaciers of the ^^^^^ drinking vessel , ,
Drift Period. Under the peat Reindeers skuii used as drink- even of the dog, nor any
lies a laver of calc-tufa, four '"^^ ^^ssei by men of the stone bones of the stag, roe, chamois,
- - - ' Age. British Museum collection. c?' ' '
' Everything corre-
to five feet thick, a fresh-water
formation from the water-courses that
now unite with the source of the Schus-
sen. Under this protecting cover of tufa
were the remains of the Glacial Period
and Glacial Man. The tufa covered a
bed of moss of a dark brown colour,
inclining to green, the moss still splen-
didly preserved. Under this bed of moss
was the glacier drift. The moss was
dripping full of water and intermingled
with moist sand. In it were the relics
of Glacial Man — all lying in heaps as
fresh and firm as if they had been only
recently collected. A stirkv. dark-brown
mud filled the
moss and sand
and the smallest
hollow spaces of
antlers and bones,
and emitted a
musty smell.
Glacial Man had
used the place as
a refuse -pit.
Among the bones
and splinters of
bone of animals
that had been
slaughtered and
consumed by man, among ashes and
charred remans, among smoke-stained
hearthstones and the traces of fire, there
lay here, one upon the other, numerous
knives, arrow - heads, and lance - heads
of flint, and the most varied kinds
of hand-made articles of reindeer horn.
All this was in a shallow pit about seven
140
TREASURE-STORES OF PRIMEVAL KNOWLEDGE
Such to-day are the mounds of prehistoric rubbish accumulated
bjr the people of the Stone Age. These Danish "kitchen
_: jj — ' i^a,ve vastly enriched our knowledge of the remote past.
middens '
or ibex,
sponds to a Northern climate, such as
begins to-day at 70° north latitude. We
see Upper Swabia traversed by moraines
and melting glaciers, whose waters wash
the glacier-sand into moss-grown pools.
We find a Greenland moss covering the
wet sands in thick banks ; between the
moraines of the glaciers we have to
imagine wide green pastures, rich enough
to support herds of reindeer, which roved
about there as they do in Greenland, or
on the forest borders of Norway and
Siberia, at the present day. Here, also,
are the regions of tlie rarnivora dangerous
to the reindeer —
the glutton and
the wolf, and, in
the second rank,
the bear and Arc-
tic fox.
According to
Fraas, it is on this
scene that man of
the Glacial Period
appears; in all pro-
bability, a hunter,
invited by the pre-
sence of the rein-
deer to spend some
time — probably only the better portion of
the year — on the borders of ice and snow.
It is true that the relic-bed that tells of
his life and doings is only a refuse-pit,
which contains nothing good in the way of
art productions, but only broken or spoiled
articles and refuse from the manufacture
of implements. The bulk of the material
141
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
consists of kitchen refuse, such as, besides
charcoal and ashes, opened marrow-bones
and broken skulls of game. Not one of
the bones found here shows a trace of
any other instrument than a stone. It
was on a stone that the bone was laid,
and it was with a stone that the blow was
struck. Such breaking-stones came to light
in large numbers. They were
History merely field stones collected on
If * . ^ „ the spot, particular preference
Rubbish Heap , . ^ . ^ ^ i ii„j
bemg given to finely rolled
quartz boulders of about the size of a
man's fist. Others were rather rudely
formed into the shape of a club, with a
kind of handle, such as is produced half
accidentally and half intentionally in split-
ting large pieces. Larger stones were also
found — gneiss slabs, from one to two feet
square, slaty Alpine limes, and rough
blocks of one stone or another, which had
probably represented slaughtering-blocks,
or done duty as hearthstones, as on many
of them traces of fire were visible. Where
these stones had stood near the fire they
were scaled, and all were more or less
blackened by charcoal. Smaller pieces of
slate and slabs of sandstone blackened by
fire may have supplied the place of clay
pottery in many respects ; for, with all
the blackened stones, not a fragment of a
clay vessel was found in the layers of char-
coal and ashes of the relic-bed.
The flint implements are of the form
familiar to us from Taubach and the
Somme valley, being simply chipped, not
ground or polished. At the source of the
Schussen, also, only comparatively small
pieces of the precious raw material were
found for the manufacture of stone imple-
ments. So that here, too, as at Taubach,
Lyell's third form, the knife or flake, was
practically the only one represented. They
fall into two groups — pointed lancet-
shaped knives and blunt saw-shaped stones.
The former served as knife-blades and
dagger-blades, and lance-heads and arrow-
heads ; the latter represented
«*-Jw . the blades of the tools required
Drift Man s r , • • j i ^ t-i.
~, . tor workmg remdeer horn. 1 he
larger implements are between
one and a quarter and one and a half
inches broad and three to three and a half
inches long ; but the majority of them
are far smaller, being about one and a half
inches long and only three-eighths of an
inch broad. The various flint blades ap-
pear to have been used in handles and
hafts of reindeer horn. Numerous pieces
142
occur which can only be explained as
such handles, either ready or in course of
manufacture.
Moreover, owing to the want of larger
flints, numerous weapons, instruments,
and implements were carved from rein-
deer horn and bone for use in the chase
and in daily life. Fraas has ascertained
exactly the technical process employed in
producing articles of reindeer horn, and
we see with wonder how the Glacial men
of Swabia handled their defective carving-
knives and saws on the very principle
of modern technics. They are principally
weapons — for example, long pointed bone
daggers, otherwise mostly punchers, awls,
plaiting-needles (of wood), and arrow-
heads with notched grooves. These may
possibly be poison-grooves ; other trans-
verse grooves may have served partly for
fastening the arrow-head by means of
some thread-like binding material, prob-
ably twisted from reindeer sinews, as is
done by the Reindeer Lapps at the present
day ; other scratches occur as ornaments.
The forms of the bone implements show
generally a decided sense of symmetry
TL CI -11 J ^^^ ^ certain taste. For in-
The Skilled g^^^^g^ ^ dagger, with a perfor-
f th ^^ft ^^^^ knob for suspension, and a
large carefully-carved fish-hook.
Groove-like or hollow spoon-shaped pieces
of horn were explained by Fraas to be
cooking and eating utensils ; probably
they also served for certain technical
purposes — as for dressing skins for clothing
and tents, like the stone scrapers found in
the Somme valley. A doubly perforated
piece of a young reindeer's antler appears
to be an arrow-stretching apparatus, like
those generally finely ornamented, used
by the Esquimaux for the same pur-
pose. A branch of a reindeer's antlers,
with deep notches filed in, is declared by
the discoverer to be a " tally." The
notches are partly simple strokes filed in
to the depth of a twelfth of an inch, and
partly two main strokes connected by
finer ones. "The strokes," says Fraas, " are
plainly numerical signs — a kind of note,
probably, of reindeer or bears killed, or
some other memento." Among the objects
found were also pieces of red paint of the
size of a nut — clearly fabrications of clayey
ironstone, ground and washed, and pro-
bably mixed with reindeer fat and kneaded
into a paste. The paint crumbled between
the fingers, felt greasy, and coloured the
skin an intense red. It may have been
HUNTING FOR FOOD IN THE LATER ICE
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
AGE
used in the first instance for painting the
body. The Glacial men at the source of the
Schussen were, according to the results of
these finds, fishermen and hunters, with-
out dogs or domestic animals and without
any knowledge of agriculture and pottery.
But they understood how to kindle fire,
which they used for cooking their food.
They knew how to kill the wild reindeer,
bear, and other animals of the district they
hunted over ; their arrows hit the swan,
and their fish-hooks drew fish from the
deep. They were artists in the chipping
of flint into tools and weapons ; with the
former they worked reindeer horn in the
most skilful manner. Traces of binding
material indicate the use of threads,
probably prepared from reindeer sinews ;
the plaiting-needle may have been em-
ployed for making fishing-lines. Threads
and finely-pointed pricking instruments
indicate the art of sewing ; clothing
probably consisted of the skins of the
animals killed.
To this material concerning Drift Man,
scientificaUy vouched for, coming from
143
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
IMPLEMENTS OF THE STONE AGE
The upper illustrations show handles of celt or stone-
cutting instruments and method of hafting ; the
lower picture is that of a handmill of sandstone.
Drift strata that have certainly never
been disturbed, other countries have
hitherto made no equal contributions
really enlarging our view. Yet the numer-
ous places where palaeolithic — that is,
only rudely chipped — implements of flint,
such as were doubtless used by Drift Man,
have been found must not remain un-
mentioned here. We know of them in
Northern, Central, and Southern France,
in the South of England, in the loess at
Thiede, near Brunswick, and in Lower
Austria, Moravia, Hungary, Italy, Greece,
Spain, Portugal, North Africa, and Russia.
A HUT-CIRCLE OF THE BRONZE AGE
One of the earliest forms of habitation in Britain. From
the British Museum "Guide to the Bronze Age."
It is of special importance to note that
similar flint tools have also been found
along with extinct land mammalia in the
stratified drift of the Nerbudda valley, in
South India, as the supposition more than
suggests itself that Drift Man came to our
continent with the Drift fauna that immi-
grated from Asia. The possibility that
man also got from North Asia to North
America with the mammoth during the
Drift Period can no longer be dismissed
after the results of pala;ontological re-
search. It explains at once the close con-
nection between the build of the American
and the great Asiatic (Mongolian) races.
Stone implements of palaeolithic form
have been found in Drift strata in North
America, and the same applies also, as
we have seen, to South America. The
best finds there were those made by
Ameghino in the pampas formation of
Argentina. Here marrow-bones, split,
worked, and burnt, and jaws of the stag,
glyptodon, mastodon, and toxodon have
been repeatedly found along with flint
REMAINS OF A STONE AGE MANSION
These remains of a large pile hut discovered in Germany
show that Stone Age Man had made good progress in
building. The lower diagram shows a transverse section.
tools of palaeolithic stamp ; and Santiago
Roth, who took part in these researches,
supposes that fossil man in South America
occasionally used the coats of mail of
the gigantic armadillos as dwellings.
But the civilisation of South American
man is doubtless identical with that of
European fossil man — tools and weapons
of the stone types familiar in Europe, the
THE EARLIEST EFFORTS AT BOAT-BUILDING
The dug-out canoe, hollowed from a single trunk, was
the far-off parent of the ocean-going ship. The upper
picture represents a prehistoric canoe found in Sussex
and the lower example is taken from a German specimen.
working of bones, the use of fire for cooking,
and animal food, with the consequent
special fondness for fat and marrow.
144
THE WORLD
BEFORE
HISTORY-IV
Professor
JOHANNES
RANKE
PRIMITIVE MAN IN THE PAST & THE PRESENT
TO the picture of Drift Man that has been
drawn for us by the discoveries of
human activity in deposits of uniform
character and sharply defined age, the
much richer but far less reliable finds in
the bone caves add scarcely any entirely
new touches. Von Zittel says :
The evidence of the caves is unfortunately
shaken by the uncertainty that, as a rule,
prevails with regard to the manner in which
their contents were washed into them or
otherwise introduced, and also with regard
to the beginning and duration of their
occupation ; moreover, later inhabitants
have frequently mixed up their relics with
the heritage of previous occupants.
This doubt strikes us particularly for-
cibly as regards man's co-existence with
the extinct animals of the earlier periods
of the Drift, the Preglacial and Interglacial
Periods. On the other hand, the habitation
of the caves by man during the Reindeer
Period appears in many cases to be per-
fectly established, and, according to Von
Zittel, the oldest human dwellings in caves,
rock-niches, and river-plains in Europe
belong for the most part to
the Reindeer Period — that is,
the second Glacial and, in par-
ticular, the Postglacial Period.
In the caves there is also no domestic
animal, and no pottery or trace of pot-
sherds, in the best-defined strata where
Drift Man has been found. In the
Hohlefels cave, in the Ach valley in
Swabia, a new utensil was found in the
form of a cup for drinking purposes or for
drawing water, made out of the back part
of a reindeer's skuU. Also a new tool in the
form of a fine sewing-needle with eye, from
the long bone of a swan, such as have also
been found in the caves of the Perigord.
Teeth of the wild horse and lower jaws
of the wildcat, which are found in the
caves, perforated for suspending either
as ornaments or amulets, are also hitherto
unknown, it appears, in the stratified Drift.
As both animals are at a later period
connected with the deity and with witch-
craft, one could imagine that similar
primitive religious ideas existed among the
old cave-dwellers. In the stratum of the
First
Dwellers in
Caves
Reindeer Period at the Schweizerbild, near
Schaffhausen, Niiesch found a musical
instrument, " a reindeer whistle," and
shells pierced for use as ornaments.
The finds in the French cave districts
prove that man was able to develop
certain higher refinements of life, even
during the Drift in the real flint districts--
, where a very suitable material
Drift Man s ^^^ ^^ ^^^.^ disposal in the
Working ^.j^^ ^j^^^ j^y ^^^^^ everywhere
Materia s ^^ ^^^ easily dug up ; which
was worked with comparative ease into
much more perfect and efficient weapons
and implements than those supplied by
the wilder stretches of moor and fen of
Germany, with their scarcity of flint.
If we compare the small, often tiny,
knives and flint flakes from the German
places with the powerful axes and lance-
heads of those regions, it is self-evident
how much more laborious life must have
been for the man who used the former..
What labour he must have expended in
carving weapons and implements out of
bone and horn, while flint supplied the
others with much better and more lasting
ones with less expenditure of time and
trouble ! In this light a wealth of flint
was a civilising factor of that period which
is not to be under-estimated. In the flint
districts not only are the stone implements
better worked, answering in a higher
degree the purpose of the weapon and the
tool, but dehght in ornament and decora-
tion is also more prominent.
Life in the caves and grottos and under
the rock shelters in the neighbourhood
of rivers was by no means quite wretched.
The remains left in the caves
The Life ^^ ^j^^-^ former inhabitants
P ' * give almost as clear an idea
*^** of the life of man in those
primeval times as the buried cities of
Herculaneum and Pompeii do of the
manners and customs of the Italians in
the first century of the Christian era.
The floors of these caves in which men
formerly lived appear to consist entirely
of broken bones of animals killed in the
chase intermixed with rude implements
145
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Drift
Man as
Artist
and weapons of bone and unpolished
stone, and also charcoal and large burnt
stones, indicating the position of fire-
places. Flints and chips without number,
rough masses of stone, awls, lance-heads,
hammers, and saws of flint and chert lie
in motley confusion beside bone needles,
carved reindeer antlers, arrow-heads and
harpoons, and pointed pieces
of horn and bone ; in addition
to which are also the broken
bones of the animals that served
as food, such as reindeer, bison, horse,
ibex, saiga antelope, and musk-ox. The
reindeer supplied by far the greater part
of the food, and must at that time have
lived in Central France in large herds and
in a wild state, all trace of the dog being
absent.
Among these abundant remains of
culture archaeologists were surprised to
find real objects of art from the hand of
Drift Man, proving that thinking about
his surroundings had developed into the
ability to reproduce what he saw in
drawing and modelling. The first objects
of this kind were found in the caves of the
Perigord. They are, on the one hand,
drawings scratched on stones, reindeer
bones, or pieces of horn, mostly very
naive, but sometimes really lifelike,
chiefly representing animals, but also
men ; on the other hand imitations plasti-
cally carved out of pieces of reindeer horn,
bones, or teeth. Such engravings also
occurred on pieces of ivory, and plastic
representations in this material have been
preserved. On a cylindrical piece of
reindeer horn from the cave excavations
in the Dordogne is the representation of a
fish, and on the shovel-piece of a rein-
deer's horn are the head and breast of an
animal resembling the ibex. Illustrations of
horses give faithful reproductions of the
flowing mane, unkempt tail, and dispro-
portionately large head of the large-
headed wild horse of the Drift. The
most important among these
ic urcs representations are such as
from the ', , J
r» c^ \xr ..endeavour to reproduce an
Drift World ,. , . , i. a n
historical event. An illus-
tration of this kind represents a group
consisting of two horses' heads and an
apparently naked male figure ; the latter
bears a long staff or spear in his right
hand, and stands beside a tree, which is
bent down almost in coils in order to ac-
commodate itself to the limited space, and
whose boughs, indicated by parallel lines,
146
show it to be a pine or fir. Connected
with the tree is a system of vertical and
horizontal lines, apparently representing
a kind of hurdlework. On the other side
of the same cylindrical piece are two
bisons' heads. Doubtless this picture tells
a tale ; it is picture-writing in exactly
the same sense as that of the North
American Indians. Our picture already
shows the transition to abbreviated
picture-writing, as, instead of the whole
animals — horses and bisons — only the
heads are given. The message-sticks of
the Australians bear certain resemblances ;
Bastian has rightly described them as the
beginnings of writing.
If we have interpreted them aright, the
finds that have been made, with the
tally from the source of the Schussen
and the message-stick from the caves of
the Dordogne, place the art of counting,
the beginnings of writing, the first artistic
impulses, and other elements of primitive
culture right back in the Drift period.
" None of the animals whose remains
lie in the Drift strata," says Oscar Fraas,
" were tamed for the service of man."
The Emcrg-
On the contrary, man stood
in hostile relation to all of
u^ ° XM- J them, and only knew how to
Human Mind , ,, /, • -^ , ,
kill them, in order to support
himself with their flesh and blood and the
marrow of their bones. It was not so
much his physical strength which helped
man in his fight for existence, for with
few exceptions the animals he killed were
infinitely superior to him in strength ;
indeed it is not easy, even with the help
of powder and lead, to kill the elephant,
rhinoceros, grizzly bear, and bison, or to
hunt down the swift horse and reindeer.
It was a question of finding out, with his
mental superiority, the beast's unguarded
moments, and of surprising it or bringing
it down in pits and snares. All the more
wonderful does the savage of the European
Drift Period appear to us, "for we see
that he belongs to the first who exercised
the human mind in the hard battle of life,
and thereby laid the foundation of all
later developments in the sense of progress
in culture." And yet, in the midst of
this poor life, a sense of the little pleasures
and refinements of existence already began
to develop, as proved by the elegantly
carved and decorated weapons and imple-
ments, and there were even growing a sense
of the beauty of Nature and the power of
copying it. The bone needles with eyes and
PRIMITIVE NATURE FOLK ENGAGED IN FISHING
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon.
the fine awls are evidences of the art of sew-
ing, and the numerous scrapers of flint and
bone teach us that Drift Man knew how
to dress skins for clothing purposes, and
did it according to the method still used
among the Esquimaux and most northern
Indians at the present day. Spinning
does not seem to have been known. On
the other hand Drift Man knew how to
twist cords, impressions and indentations
of which are conspicuous on the bone and
horn implements ; on which also thread-
marks were imitated as a primitive
ornament. Pottery was unknown to
Drift Man. Indeed, even to-day the
production of pottery is not a commonly
felt want of mankind. The leather bottle,
made of the skin of some small animal
stripped off whole without a seam, turned
inside out as it were, takes the place of
the majority of the larger vessels ; on the
other hand, liquids can also be kept for
some time in a tightly-made wicker basket.
The art of plaiting was known to Drift
Man. This is shown by the ornaments on
weapons and implements, the plaiting-
147
HISTORY OF THE WORlD
needle from the find at the source of the
Schussen, and the hurdlework represented
on the message-stick mentioned above,
which may be either a hurdle made of
boughs and branches or a summer dwell-
ing house. To these acquirements, based
chiefly on an acquaintance with serviceable
weapons and implements, is added the
art of representing natural objects by
drawing and carving. This results in the
attempt to retain historical momenta in
the form of abridged illustrations for the
purpose of communicating them to others
— incipient picture-writing. The tally
shows the method of representing numbers
— generally only one stroke each, but also
two strokes connected by a line to form
a higher unit. Of the art of building not
a trace is left to us apart from the laying
together of rough stones for fireplaces ;
nor have tombs of that period of ancient
times been discovered.
The civihsation of Drift Man and his
whole manner of life do not confront the
present human race as something strange,
but fit perfectly into the picture exhibited
by mankind at the present day. Drift
Man nowhere steps out of this frame. If
:?^r
Mercier
EARLY AGRICULTURISTS, WITH IMPLEMENTS OF BONE, STONE, AND BRONZE
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon.
148
AN EMIGRATION OF THE GAULS IN THE BRONZE
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon.
AGE
a European traveller were nowadays to
come upon a body of Drift men on the
borders of eternal ice, towards the north
or south pole of our globe, nothing would
appear extraordinary and without analogy
to him ; indeed it would be possible for him
to come to an understanding with them by
means of picture-writing, and to do busi-
ness with them by means of the tally.
The manner of life led by man beyond
the borders of higher civilisation, especi-
ally under extreme climatic conditions,
depends almost exclusively on his out-
ward surroundings and the possibility
of obtaining food. The Esquimaux, who,
like Drift Man of Central Europe in former
times, live on the borders of eternal ice
with the Drift animals that emigrated
thither, — the reindeer, musk-ox, bear,
Arctic fox, etc. — are restricted, like him,
to hunting and fishing, and to a diet
consisting almost entirely of flesh and
fat ; corn-growing and the keeping of
herds of domestic animals being self-
prohibitive. Their kitchen refuse exactly
resembles that from the Drift. Before
their acquaintance with the civilisation
of modern Europe they used stone and
149
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
bone besides driftwood for making their
weapons and implements, as they still do
to a certain extent at the present day,
either from preference or from super-
stitious ideas. Their binding material
consisted of threads twisted from reindeer
sinews, with which they sewed their
clothes and fastened their harpoons and
arrows, the latter resembling in form those
of Drift Man. They knew no more than
he the arts of spinning and weaving, their
clothes being made from the skins of the
animals they hunted ; pots were unknown
and unnecessary to
them.
It has often been
thought that we
should have a definite
criterion of the period
if it could be proved
that fresh mammoth
ivory was employed
at the particular time
for making imple-
ments and weapons,
or ornaments, carv-
ings, and drawings.
There can be no
doubt that when
Drift Man succeeded
in killing a mammoth
he used the tusks for
his purposes. But on
the borders of eter-
nal ice, where alone
we could now expect
to find a frozen Drift
Man, no conclusion
could be drawn from
objects of mammoth
ivory being in the
jwssession of a corpse
to determine the
great age of the
latter. For the many
mammoth tusks
which have been found
PRIMITIVE ART OF OUR OWN DAY
The picture-writing of the American Indians in our own
day offers an interesting parallel to that of the primitive
peoples of the remotest past. The Pawnees decorate their
buffalo robes with such drawings as these, representing
a procession of medicine men, the foremost giving freedom
to his favourite horse as a sacrifice to the Great Spirit.
and used from
time immemorial in North Siberia, on the
New Siberian Islands, and in other places,
are absolutely fresh, and are even employed
in the arts of civilised countries in exactly
the same way as fresh ivory. Under the
name of " mammoth ivory " the fossil tusks
dug up by ivory-seekers, or mammoth-
hunters, form an important article of com-
merce.
The same conditions as many parts of
Northern Siberia still exhibit at the {)resent
day prevailed over the whole of Central
150
Europe at the end of the Glacial Period and
the beginning of the Postglacial Period.
Here man lived on frozen ground on the
borders of ice-fields with the reindeer and
its companions, as he does to-day in
Northern Asia, and here, too — as he does
there to-day — he must have found the
woolly-haired mammoth preserved by the
cold in the ice and frozen ground. The
Drift reindeer-men of Central Europe pre-
sumably searched for mammoth tusks just
as much as the present reindeer-men in
North Asia. The great field of mammoth
carrion at Predmost
was, therefore, a very
powerful attraction,
not only for the beasts
of prey — chief among
them wolves — but
also for man.
In France especially
many primitive works
of art of the " Ivory
Epoch " have been
found, and even the
nude figure of woman
is not wanting ; but
no proof is given that
these carvings belong
to the time when the
mammoth still lived.
Much sensation has
been caused by an
engraving on a piece
of mammoth ivory
representing a hairy
mammoth with its
mane and strongly-
curved tusks. This
illustration has been
taken as unexception-
able proof that the
artist of the Drift
Period who did it saw
and portrayed the
mammoth alive. But
could the mammoth hunter Schumachow
— the Tunguse who, in 1709, discovered, in
the ice of the peninsula of Tumys Bykow at
the mouth of the Lena, the mammoth now
erected in the collection at the St. Peters-
burg Academy [see page 123] — have
pictured the animal otherwise when
it was freshly melted out of the ice ?
And the Madelaine cave in the Peri-
gord, where the piece of ivory with
the picture of the mammoth was found,
certainly belongs to the Reindeer Period.
Had we not independent proofs that
THE EARLIEST ART: MANKIND'S FIRST EFFORTS IN PICTURE-MAKING
These illustrations are of engravings on stone and bone and scratchings on rocks made by prehistoric man,
chiefly in France. The figures of the reindeer and those of the mammoth and the bison, the two latter found at
Dordogne, are astonishingly good, and indicate genuine power of draughtsmanship at a remote period of human life.
151
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Drift Man lived in Central Europe — for
instance, at Taubach — with the great
extinct pachydermata, neither the finds
in the "loess" near Predmost, nor the
articles of ivory, nor the illustration of the
mammoth itself, could prove it. They
furnish absolute proof of the
c*^ *d th 6-^'stence of Drift Man only
omparc wi \j^^]^ ^q ^j^g Reindeer Period.
Modern Man ^^ i • i ■, ,^
io decide whether a corpse
frozen in the stone-ice belonged to a
Drift Man, the examination of the corpse
itself, its skull, bones, and soft parts,
would no more suffice than clothing,
implements, and ornament. For at least
so much is con-
fidently asserted
by many palaeonto-
logists, that all the
skulls and bones
hitherto known to
have been ascribed
to Drift Man by
the most eminent
paleontologists,
geologists, and
anthropologists,
cannot be dis-
tinguished from
those of men of the
l)resent day. Von
Zittel, the foremost
scholar in the field
of palaeontology in
Germany, says :
The only remains
of Drift Man of re-
liable age are a skull
from Olmo, near
Chiana, in Tuscany ;
a skull from Egis-
heim, in Alsace: a
lower jaw from the
Naulette cave near
I'urfooz, in Belgium ; and a fragment of
jaw from the Schipka cave in Moravia. This
material is not sufficient for determining race,
but all human remains of reliable age from
the drift of Europe, and all the skulls found
in caves, agree in size, form, and capacity
with Homo sapiens, and are well formed
throughout. In no way do they fill the gap
between man and ape.
" On the other hand," writes Dr.
Chalmers Mitchell, " a large majority of
modern anatomists and palaeontologists
accept the antiquity of such skulls as
the Neanderthal specimen, and agree
that these pomt to the existence of a
liuman race inferior to any now existing.
This race comprised powerfully-built indi-
152
PRIMITIVE PEOPLE OF TO-DAY
Until they came in touch with European travellers the
Esquimaux were in precisely the same condition as Drift Man :
they were living in the Ice Age. They are but little more
advanced now, and the difference between them and prehistoric
men is slight. This is a group of young Esquimau women.
viduals, with low foreheads, prominent,
bony ridges above the eyes, and retreating
chins. The radius and ulna were unusually
divergent, so that the forearms must have
been heavy and clumsy. The thigh-bones
were bent and the shin-bones short, so
that the race must have been bow-legged
and clumsy in gait.
" The intermediate position of the.se
primitive types has received extraordinary
confirmation by the discovery of what
may truly be called the link, no longer
missing, between man and the apes. In
1894, Dr. Eugene Dubois discovered in the
Island of Java in a bed of volcanic ashes
containing the re-
mains of Pliocene
animals the roof of
a small skull, two
grinding-teeth, and
a diseased femur.
These remains in-
dicate an animal
which, when erect,
stood not less than
5 ft. 6 in. high.
The teeth and
thigh-bones were
very human, and
the skull, although
very human, had
prominent eyebrow
ridges like those
of theNennderthal
type, and a capa-
city of about 1,000
cubic centimetres
— that is to say,
much greater than
that of the largest
living apes, and
falling short by
about 100 cubic
centimetres of the largest skull capacities
of existing normal human beings. This
creature, regarded at first by some
anatomists as a degenerate man, by
others as a high ape, has now been
definitely accepted as a new type of being,
. -, intermediate between man
D . ^^^ m< and the apes and designated
Between Man tim; .; j. - >>
. . y as Ftthecanthropus erectus.
There is no doubt that Asia,
Europe, North Africa, and North America,
so far as their ice-covering allowed of their
being inhabited, form one continuous
region for the distribution of Paleolithic
Man, in which all discoveries give similar
results. In this vast region the lowest
THE
OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLE
DAY
IMC HOMES wi XXX.. - , <■ c ■ 4.
There are people still living in dwelling-places of prehistoric type. This photograph of Esquimau stone
Ind turf huts, mGreenllnd!^ shows exactly the kind of dwellings used by prehistoric men m the Ice Age.
— THE GRADUAL EXTINCTION OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLES
?mmmmmsmmsmm
153
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
and oldest prehistoric stratum that serves
as the basis of historical civilisation is the
homogeneous PaL-eoIithic stratum. In the
Drift Period, Palaeolithic Man penetrated
into South America, as into a new region,
with northern Drift animals. In Central
and South Africa and Australia, Palaeo-
lithic Man does not yet seem to be known.
All the more important is it that in Tas-
mania Palaeolithic conditions of civilisation
existed until the
middle of the last
century.
The palaeontology
of man has hitherto
obtained good geo-
logical information of
the oldest Palaeolithic
culture-stratum of
the Drift in only a
few parts of the earth,
and only in Tasmania
does this oldest stra-
tum appear to have
cropped out free, and
still uncovered by
other culture strata,
down to our own times. Otherwise
it is everywhere overlaid by a second,
later culture-stratum of much greater
thickness, which, although opened up
in almost innumerable places, is not
spread over the whole earth as is the
Palaeolithic stratum. As oppo-
sed to the earliest Stone Age
of the Drift, which we have
come to know as the Palaeolithic
Period, this has been called the Later
Stone Age or Neolithic Period.
The Neolithic Period is also ignorant of
the working of metals ; for weapons and
implements, stone is the exclusive hard
material of which the blades are made.
But geologically and palaeontologically the
two culture-strata are widely and sharply
separated.
As regards Europe, and a large part of
the other continents, the second stratum
of the culture of the human race still lies
at prehistoric depth. But in other exten-
sive parts of the earth the stratum of
Neolithic culture was not covered by other
culture-strata until far into the period of
written history. Even a large part of
Europe was still inhabited by history-less
tribes of the later Stone Age at the time
when the old civilised lands of Asia and of
Africa, and the coasts of the Mediter-
ranean, had everywhere — on the basis of
154
A CREATURE BETWEEN APE AND MAN
The skull of the Fossil Ape-man found in 1894, ir
the island of Java ; restored by Dr. Eugene Dubois.
Backward
Races of
Europe
the same Neolithic elements, with the
increasing use of metals — already risen to
that higher stage of civilisation which,
with the historical written records of
Egypt and Babylonia, forms the basis of
our present chronology.
When these civilised nations came into
direct contact with the more remote
nations of the Old World, they found them,
as we have said, still, to a certain extent,
at the Neolithic stage
of civilisation, just
as, when Europeans
settled in America,
the great majority of
the aborigines had
not yet passed the
Neolithic stage, at
which, indeed, the
lowest' primitive
tribes of Central
Brazil still remain.
Australia, and a large
part of the island
world of the South
Sea, had not yet
risen above the Neo-
lithic stage (Tasmania, probably, not
even above the Palaeolithic) when they
were discovered. There the Stone Age,
to a certain extent, comes down to modern
times ; likewise in the far north of Asia,
in Greenland, in the most northern parts
of America, and at the south point of the
New Continent among the Fuegians.
The men of the later Stone Age are the
ancestors of the civilised men of to-day.
Classical antiquity among Greeks and
Romans had still a consciousness of this,
at least partly ; it was not entirely for-
gotten that the oldest weapons of men
did not consist of metal, but of stone, and
even inferior material. The worked stones
which the people then, as now, designated
as weapons of the deity, as lightning-
stones or thunderbolts, were recognised by
keener-sighted men as weapons of primeval
inhabitants of the land.
The " kitchen middens " on the Danish
coasts mark places of more or less permanent
y.. . settlement, consisting of
J,.. . more or less numerous in-
nlddcns Tell Us (dividual dwellings. From
these middens a rich in-
ventory of finds 'has been made, afford-
ing a glimpse of the life and doings of
those ancient times. The heaps consist
principally of thousands upon thousands
of opened shells of oysters, cockles, and
PRIMITIVE MAN IN THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
other shellfish still eaten at the present
day, mingled with the bones of the roe,
stag, aurochs, wild boar, beaver, seal, etc.
Bones of fishes and birds were also
made out, among the latter being the
bones of the wild swan and of the now
extinct great auk, and, what is specially
important in determining the geological
age of these remains, large numbers of
the bones of the capercailzie. Domestic
animals are absent with the exception
of the dog, whose bones, however, are
broken, burnt, gnawed in the same way
as those of the beasts of the chase.
Everything proves that on the sites of
these middens there formerly lived a race
of fishers and hunters, whose chief food
consisted of shellfish, the shells of which
accumulated in mounds around their
dwellings. Proofs of agriculture and
cattle-rearing there are none ; the dog alone
was frequently bred not only as a com-
panion in the chase, but also for its flesh.
The state of civilisation of the old Danish
shellfish-eaters was not quite a low one
in spite of its primitive colouring, and in
essential points was superior to that of
Palaeolithic Man. Not only had they
tamed a really domestic animal, the dog,
but they made and used clay vessels
for cooking and storing purposes. The
cooking was done on fireplaces. They
could work deer-horn and bone well.
Of the former hammer-axes with round
holes were made, and of animal bones
arrow-heads, awls, and needles, with
the points carefully smoothed. Small
bone combs appeared to have served
not so much for toilet purposes as
for dividing animal sinews for making
threads, or for dressing the threads in
weaving.
In the way of ornaments there were
perforated animal teeth. The fish re-
mains found in the middens belong to the
plaice, cod, herring, and eel. To catch these
-^ .f S-j^^r^ NORTH l^^;^' (STOCKH^ '^'lif^ '^'
CD ^< ^3ig"*™ / hC"^^^^ '^ A JTJ Y
Scdiyls., >-t:— t^y,_A, ^V^^^^-Ji'^ BrunswKS, ^„^
EUROPE IN THE ICE AGE
The map illustrates the extent of the Ice Age in Europe. It will be noticed that in England the ice-cap did not
extend south of the position of London though it occurred much further south in the mountain regions of the Pyrenees,
the Alps, Tyrol, the Carpathians and the Caucasus. The dark portions of the map represent the extent of the ice
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Drift Man
and His
Adversaries
deep-sea fish the fishermen must have gone
out to sea, which imphes the possession of
boats of some kind. Nor was only small
game hunted, but also large game. Ninety
per cent, of the animal bones occurring
in the shell-mounds consist of those of
large animals, especially the deer, roe, and
wild boar. Even such dangerous adver-
saries as the aurochs, bear,
wolf, and lynx were killed,
likewise the beaver, wildcat,
seal, otter, marten, and fox.
The very numerous fragments of clay
vessels belong partly to large pot-like
vessels without handles and with pointed
or flat bottoms, and partly to small oval
bowls with round bottoms. All vessels
were made with the free hand of coarse
clay, into which small fragments of
granitic stone were kneaded ; as ornament
they have in a few cases incisions or
im{;)ressions, mostly made with the finger
itself on the upper edge.
The great importance of the Danish
middens in the general history of mankind
is due to the fact that their age is geologi-
cally established, so that they can serve
as a starting-point for chronology. It is
to Japetus Steenstrup that the early
history of our race owes this chronological
fixing of an initial date.
The earliest inhabitants of the North of
Europe during the Stone Age, as recorded
by these kitchen-middens of the Danish
jieriod, were scarcely superior to Palaeo-
lithic Man in civilisation, judging from
outward appearances. But a closer investi-
gation taught us that, in spite of the
poverty of their remains, a higher develop-
ment of civilisation is unmistakable. And
this superiority of the Neolithic over the
PaLneolithic Epoch becomes far more
evident if we take as our standard of com-
parison, not the poor fisher population, who
probably first reached the Danish shores
as pioneers, but the Neolithic civilisation
that had been fully developed in sunnier
^^ ^. ^ lands and followed closely upon
The First ,i ^ "^ , ,'
„, . , these trappers or squatters.
Elements of ^^ j. ^ i i- ^ r ^ ■
„. ... ,. Next to huntmg and fishmg,
Civilisation ,,1 , 11 1.
cattle-breedmg and agriculture
are noticeable as the first elements of Neo-
lithic civilisation, and in connection with
them the preparation of flour and cooking ;
and as technical arts, chiefly carving and
the fine working of stone, of which wea-
pons and the most various kinds of tools
were made ; with the latter wood, bone,
deer-horn, etc., could be worked. The
156
blades are no longer sharpened merely by
chipping, but by grinding, and are made in
various technically perfect forms. Special
importance was attached to providing
them with suitable handles, for fixing which
the stone implement or weapon was either
provided with a hole, or, as in America
especially, with notches or grooves.
In addition to these, there are the primi-
tive arts of man — the ceramic art, spinning,
and weaving. In the former, especially,
an appreciation of artistic form and decora-
tion by ornament is developed. The orna-
ment becomes a kind of symbolical
written language, the eventual deciphering
of which appears possible in view of the
latest discoveries concerning the orna-
mental symbolism of the primitive races
of the present day. Discoveries of dwell-
ings prove an advanced knowledge of
primitive architecture ; entrenchments and
tumuli acquaint us with the principles
of their earthworks ; and the giant
chambers, built of colossal blocks of stone
piled upon one another, prove that the
builders of those times were not far behind
the much-admired Egyptian builders in
^^ ., , transporting and piling masses
The Mental r , '?r, 1 • 1 1
. . of stone. Ihe burials, whose
.* . ^ _ ceremonies are revealed by
opened graves, afford a glimpse
of the mental life of that period. From
the skulls and skeletons that have been
taken from the Neolithic graves, science
has been able to reconstruct the physical
frame of Neolithic Man, which has in no
way to fear comparison with that of
modern man. Of the ornaments of the
Stone Age the most important and charac-
teristic are perforated teeth of dogs,
wolves, horses, oxen, bears, boars, and
smaller beasts of prey. How much in
favour such ornaments were is proved by
the fact that even imitations or counter-
feits of them were worn. Numerous articles
of ornament, carved from bone and deer-
horn, were universal : ornamental plates
and spherical, basket - shaj)ed, square,
shuttle-like, or chisel-shaped beads were
made of these materials and formed into
chains.
In the Swiss lake-dwellings of the Stone
Age have been found skilfully carved
ear-drojxs, needles with eyes, neat little
combs of boxwood, and hairpins, some
with heads and others with ])ierced side
protuberances. Remains of textile fabrics,
even finely twilled tissue, and also leather,
were yielded by the excavations of the
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
lake-dwellings of that period, so that we
have to imagine the inhabitants adorned
with clothes of various kinds.
What raises man of the later Stone Age
so far above Palaeolithic Man is the
posression of domestic animals and the
knowledge of agriculture. As domestic
animals of the later Stone Age we have
, _ proof of the dog, cow, horse,
^/^ . , " . . Among the animals that
Animal Friend , ^^ i j .i_ i ^
have attached themselves to
man as domestic, the first and oldest is
undoubtedly the dog. It is found dis-
tributed over the whole earth, being absent
from only a few small islands. Among
many races the dog was, and is still, the
i nly domestic animal in the proper sense
of the word. This applies to all Esquimau
tribes, to the majority of the Indians of
North and South America, and to the
continent of Australia.
We have no certain proofs that Palaeo-
lithic Man possessed the dog as a domestic
animal. In the Somme valley, at Tau-
bach, and at the source of the Schussen,
bones of the domestic dog are absent.
And yet, among Drift fauna in caves
remains of dogs have been repeatedly
met with, which have been claimed to be
the direct ancestors of the domestic dog.
The dog's attachment to man may have
taken place at different times in different
parts. Man and dog immigrate to South
America with the foreign Northern fauna
simultaneously — in a geological sense —
during the Drift. In Australia, man and
dog (dingo), as the most intimate animal
beings, are opposed to an animal world
that is otherwise anomalous and, to the
Old World, quite antiquated ; probably
man and dog also came to Australia
together. We know of fossil remains of
the dingo from the Drift, but no reliable
finds have yet proved the presence of
man during that period.
In the later Stone Age the dog already
occurs as the companion of man wherever
_. _ it occurs in historic times.
The Dog
in the
Stone Age
In Europe its remains have
been found in the Danish
kitchen-middens, in the nor-
thern Neolithic finds, in the lake-dwellings
of Switzerland, in innumerable caves of
the Neolithic Period, in the terramare of
Upper Italy, etc. It was partly a com-
paratively small breed, according to
Kiitimeyer similar to the " wachtelhund "
(setter) in size and build. Kiitimeyer
158
calls this breed the lake-dwelling dog,
after the lake-dwellings, one of the
chief places where it has been found.
Like all breeds of animals of primi-
tive domestication, the dog at this
period, according to Nehring, is small —
stunted, as it were. With the progress of
civihsation the dog also grows larger.
In the later prehistoric epochs, beginning
with the so-called " Bronze " Period, we
find throughout almost the whole of
Europe a rather larger and more powerful
breed with a more pointed snout — the
Bronze dog — whose nearest relative seems
to be the sheep-dog. At the present day
the domestic dog is mostly employed for
guarding settlements and herds and for
hunting. In the Arctic regions the Es-
quimaux also use their dogs, which are
like the sheep-dog, for personal protection
and hunting ; they do particularly good
service against the musk-ox, while the
wild reindeer is too fast for them. But
the Esquimau dog is chiefly used for
drawmg the sledge, and, where the sledge
cannot be used, as a beast of burden, since
it is unable to carry fairly heavy loads. In
China and elsewhere, as for-
merly in the old civilised
countries of South America,
the dog is still fattened and
killed for meat. So that the domestic
dog serves every possible purpose to which
domestic animals can be put, except, it
seems, for milking, although this would
not be out of the question either. The
dog was also eaten by man in the later
Stone Age, as is proved by the finds in
his kitchen refuse. The reindeer is now
restricted to the Polar regions of the Nor-
thern Hemisphere — Scandinavia, North
Asia, and North America, whereas in the
Paheolithic Period it was very numerous
throughout Russia, Siberia, and temperate
Europe down to the Alps and Pyrenees.
It does not seem ever to have been
definitely proved that the reindeer existed
in the Neolithic Period of Central and
Northern Europe, although according to
Von Zittel it lived in Scotland down to the
eleventh century and in the Hercynian
forest until the time of Caesar. The
earliest definite information we appear
to have of the tamed reindeer, which at
the present day is a herd animal with the
Lapps in Europe, and with the Samoyedes
and Reindeer Tunguses in Asia, is found
in /Elian, who speaks of the Scythians
having tame deer.
Great Value
of the
Dog to Man
PRIMITIVE MAN IN THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
Oxen at present exist nowhere in the
wild state, while the tame ox is distributed
as a domestic animal over the whole earth,
and has formed the most various breeds.
In the European Drift a wild ox, the
urus, distinguished by its size and the
size of its horns, was widely distributed,
and it still lived during the later Stone
Age with the domestic ox. In the later
prehistoric ages, and even in historic
times, the urus still occurs as a beast of
the forest.
In the later Stone Age the horse, too,
is no longer merely a beast of the chase,
but occurs also in the tame state. During
the Drift the horse lived in herds all over
Europe, North Asia, and North Africa.
From this Drift horse comes the domestic
horse now found all over the earth. Even
the wild horses of the Drift exhibit such
considerable differences from one another
that, according to Nehring's studies, these
are to be regarded as the beginning of
the formation of local breeds. The taming
and domestication of the wild horse of
the Drift, which began in the Stone Age,
led to the domestic horse being split up
. later into numerous breeds.
c aming ^^^^ ^^^^ ^-j^ horse was com-
Wii/hofsc Paratively small, with a large
head ; a similar form is still
found here and there on the extensive
barren moors of South Germany in the
moss-horse, or, as the common people call
it, the moss-cat. At the present day the
genus of the domestic horse falls, like the
ox, into two chief breeds — a smaller and
more graceful Oriental breed, and a more
powerful and somewhat larger Western
breed with the facial bones more strongly
developed. The horse of the later Stone
Age of Europe exhibits only comparatively
slight differences from the wild horse ;
it is generally a small, half-pony-like form
with a large head, evidently also a stunted
product of primitive breeding under
comparatively unfavourable conditions.
Two species extant in the Stone Age
still live wild on the steppes of Central
Asia at the present day ; one of them
also occurs as a fossil in the European
Drift, although only rarely. That the
ass occurred in the European Drift is
probable, but not proved. It has not
yet been found in the Neolithic Period of
Europe.
A survey of the palaeontology of the
domestic animals shows that they come
from wild Drift species which — at any rate,
as regards the ox, horse, and dog — are now
extinct, so that these most important do-
mestic animals now exist only in the tame
state. Some of the domestic animals came
from Asia, and, according to Von Zittel,
were imported into Europe from there ;
this applies to the peat-ox and the domestic
goat and pig. The Asiatic origin of the
domestic horse and sheep is
* ^ probable, but not proved ; the
Horse come ^, • r i i j o ^i
, A • 9 sheep IS found wild m South
from Asia? t- ^ ,, . . . „,
Europe as well as m Asia. Ihe
tarpan, a breed of horse very similar to the
wild horse, lives in herds independent of
man on the steppes of Central Asia. This
has been indicated as being probably the
parent breed of the domestic horse, and
the origin of the latter has accordingly also
been traced to Asia.
One thing is certain : a considerable
number of animal forms that co-exist
with man in Europe at the present day —
for instance, almost all the forms of our
poultry and the fine kinds of pigs and
sheep — have originally come from Asia.
Our investigations show a similar state ol
things even in the Neolithic Period.
In the North of Europe, which has
furnished us with our standard information
regarding the Neolithic culture-stratum,
the certain proofs that have hitherto been
found of agriculture and the cultivation
of useful plants having been practised at
that time (to which civilisation owes no
less than to the breeding of useful tame
animals) consist not so much of plant
remains themselves as of stone hand-mills
and spinning and weaving implements,
which indicate the cultivation of corn and
flax.
Our chief knowledge of Neolithic agri-
culture and plant culture has been fur-
nished by the lake-dwellings, especially
those of Switzerland, which have pre-
served the picture of the Neolithic civilisa-
tion of Central Europe, sketched for us, cis
it were, in the North, in its finest lines.
„. So far we can prove the cultiva-
• 'th'T k ^^°^ ^^ ^^® following useful
T, „• plants in the later Stone Age;
Dwellings f, . i • a
their remains were chiefly
found, as we have said, well preserved in
the Stone Age lake-dwellings of Switzer-
land, which have been described in
classical manner by Oswald Heer. Of
cereal grasses Heer determined, in the
rich Stone Age lake-dwellings of Wangen,
on Lake Constance, and Robenhausen, in
Lake Pfalfikon, three sorts of wheat and
159
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HORSE
The horse which was common in the Stone Age was a wild ancestor of our own domestic horse, but not
quite so large or so strong as the average well-bred creature familiar in our modern life. Its remotest ancestor
was the Hyracotherium, or Orohippus, while an intermediary stage was that of the Hypparion, or Protohippus,
in which, as shown in the diagram, the change from the foot to the hoof had advanced to a very great extent.
i6o
PRIMITIVE MAN IN THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
two varieties of barley — the six-rowed and
two-rowed. Flax was also grown by
Neolithic Man. This was, it seems, a
rather different variety from our present
flax, being narrow-leaved, and still occurs
wild, or probably merely uncultivated,
in Macedonia and Thracia. Flax has also
been found growing wild in Northern India,
on the Altai Mountains, and at the foot
of the Caucasus.
The common wheat occurring in the lake-
dwellings of the Stone Age is a small-
grained but mealy variety ; but the so-
called Egyptian wheat with large grains
also occurs.
Traces of regular gardening and vege-
table culture are altogether wanting. Some
finds, however, seem to indicate primitive
arboriculture, apples and pears having been
found dried in slices in the lake-dwellings
of the Stone Age ; there even appears to
be an improved kind of apple besides the
wild-growing crab. But although they are
chiefly wild unimproved fruit-trees of
whose fruit remains have been found, we
can imagine that these fruit-trees were
planted near the settlements, and the great
P . nutritious and health-giving
• *fK ^"^"^^ properties of the fruit, as a
St A supplement to a meat fare,
must have been all the more
appreciated owing to the lack of green
vegetables. The various wild cherries,
plums, and sloes were eaten, as also
raspberries, blackberries, and straw-
berries. Beechnut and hazelnut appear
as wild food-plants.
The original home of the most important
cereals — wheat, spelt, and barley — is not
known with absolute certainty ; probably
they came from Central Asia, where they
are said to be found wild in the region of
the Euphrates. The real millet came from
India ; peas and the other primeval legu-
minous plants of Europe, such as lentils
and beans, came likewise from the East,
partly from India. So that, apart from
flax, which probably has a more northern
home, the regular cultivated plants of the
Stone Age of Central Europe — cereal
grasses, millet, and lentils — indicate Asia
as their original home. We have therefore a
state of things similar to that observed in
the case of the domestic animals.
The potter's art was probably entirely
unknown to Palaeolithic Man, for in none of
the pure Drift finds have fragments of clay
vessels been found. So where clay vessels
or fragments of them occur, they appear as
the proof of a pwst-Drift period. On the
other hand, pottery was quite general in
the Neolithic Age of Europe. Still, the
need of clay vessels is not general among
all races of the earth even at the present
day ; up to modern times there were,
and still are, races and tribes without
pots. From their practices it is evident
. . that the European Stone men
f^fh'*'*"^^ of the Drift could also manage
p • A t **^ prepare their food, chiefly
meat, by fire without cooking
vessels. The Fuegians lay the piece of
meat to be roasted on the glowing embers
of a dying wood fire, and turn it with a
pointed forked branch so as to keep it
from burning. Meat thus prepared is very
tasty, as it retains aU the juice and only
gets a rind on the top, and the ashes that
adhere to it serve as seasoning in lieu of
salt. On a coal fire not only can fish be
grilled, stuck on wooden rods, but whole
sheep can be roasted cm wooden spits,
precisely as people have the dainty of
roast mutton in the East. To these maj^ be
added a large number of other methods of
roasting, and even boiling, without earthen
or metal vessels, which are partly vouched
for by ethnography and partly by archae-
ology, and some of which, like the so-called
" stone-boiling," are stiU practised at the
present day.
Although, according to this, pottery is
not an absolute necessary of life for man,
yet it is certain that even those poorly
equipped pioneers who first settled in
Denmark in the Pine Period, in spite of
their having an almost or quite exclusive
meat fare, had clay pottery in general use
for preparing their food, and probably also
for storing their provisions. As we have
already shown, the remains that have been
preserved in the kitchen-middens are the
oldest that have been found in Denmark.
Simple and rude as the numerous pot-
sherds that occur may appear, they are
of the highest importance on account
No Perfect °^ *^^ ^^°°^ °^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^6-
Pottery in the
Unfortunately, as we have
jj. . already seen, not a smgle
Stone Age . f i i '^^
perfect vessel has come to
light. The fragments are very thick, of
rough clay with bits of granite worked
in, and are all made by hand without the
use of the potter's wheel. The pieces
partly indicate large vessels, some with
flat bottoms, and others with the special
characteristic of pointed bottoms, so that
the vessel could not be stood up as it was.
i6i
PRIMITIVE MAN IN THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
Smaller bowls, frequently of an oval
form, also occurred with rounded bot-
toms, so that they also could not stand
by themselves. It is very important to
note that on these fragments of jiottery
we find only extraordinarily scanty and
exceedingly simple ornamental decora-
tions, consisting merely of incisions, or
impressions made with the fingers, on the
upper edge.
We shall see how far this oldest pottery
of the Stone Age is distinguished by its
want of decoration from that of the fully-
developed Stone Age. But it is very im-
portant to notice that this rudest mode of
making clay vessels, which we here see
forming the beginning of a whole series that
rises to the highest pitch of artistic perfec-
tion, remained in vogue not only during
the whole Stone Age, but even in much
later times.
It is true that in the fully developed
neolithic Stone Age of Europe the clay
pottery is also all made by hand, without
the potter's wheel, the oldest and rudest
forms still occurring everywhere, as we
have said ; but besides these a great
variety is exhibited in the size,
tone ^ gc j^j-j^^ g^j^fj mode of production
„° " * , of the pottery. The clay is
Handwork r, r -^ ■, -^ •■
often finer, and even quite
finely worked and smoothed, and the vessels
have thin sides and are burnt right through.
The thick fragments are generally only
burnt outside, frequently only on one side,
and so much that the clay has acquired a
bright red colour, whereas the inside,
although hard, has remained only a greyish
black. We have numerous perfectly pre-
served vessels of the later Neolithic Age.
They are frequently distinguished by an
artistic finish and beauty of form, and on
their surfaces we find ornaments incised
or imprinted, but rarely moulded on them,
which, although the style is only geometri-
cal, cannot be denied a keen sense of beauty
and symmetry. The clay vessels also
show the beginning of coloured decoration.
The incised strokes, dots, etc., are often
filled out with white substance (chalk
or plaster), which brings the patterns out
into bold ornamental relief from the black
or red ground of the surface.
After that it is no wonder that pottery
advanced to the real coloured painting
of the vessels during the Neolithic Period,
at least in some places.
On these vessels the handle now appears,
in its simplest form as a wart-like or flatter
projection from the side of the vessel,
pierced either vertically or horizontally
with a narrow opening just large enough
to admit of a cord being passed through.
Other handles, just like those in use at the
present day, are bowed out broad, wide,
and high for holding with the
/a^.- .■ hand. These generally begin
of Artistic -, . ii i i iu (
_ quite at the top, at the rim ot
the vessel, and are continued
from there down to its belly, whereas the
first -mentioned are placed lower, fre-
quently around the greatest circumference
of the vessel.
There is no doubt whatever that in the
main these clay vessels were made on
the spot where we find their remains at
the present day. This easily explains the
local peculiarity that we recognise in
various finds, by which certain groups may
be defined as more or less connected with
one another. Different styles may be
clearly distinguished by place and groujx
But, this notwithstanding, wherever we
meet with neolithic ceramics, they cannot
conceal their homogeneous character. In
spite of all peculiarities this general
uniform style of the ceramics of the Stone
Age, which we can easily distinguish and
determine even under its various dis-
guises, goes over the whole of Europe.
In finds that lie nearer to the old Asiatic
centres of civilisation and to the coasts of
the Mediterranean— as, for instance, at
Butmir — the vessels are in part better
worked, and the ornaments are richer
and more elegant, and the spirals more
frequent and more regular, and are some-
times moulded on, and sometimes, as we
have mentioned, even painted in colour.
But the general character remains un-
mistakably Neolithic, and may be found
not only on the Euro]:)ean coasts of the
Mediterranean and the islands
of the yEgean Sea, but in cer-
The Proofs of
Man's Mental
Development
tain respects also in Mesopo-
tamia and Egypt. The eldest
Trojan pottery also exhibits unmistak-
able points of agreement with it.
Not only the stone weapons and im])!e-
ments, but, as far as we can see, even the-
remains of the oldest ceramics, show that
uniform development of the culture of the
Neolithic Period which proves a like course
of mental develoi)ment in mankind.
163
THE WORLD
BEFORE
HISTORY— V
Professor
JOHANNES
RANKE
THE HOME LIFE OF PRIMITIVE FOLK
What the
L&ke Dwell
ings Tell
A PICTURE, of unequalled clearness of
■**■ delineation, of the general conditions
of the life and culture of Central European
Man during the Neolithic Period, was
given, according to the results of the cele-
brated researches of Ferdinand Keller and
his school of Swiss archaeologists, by the
lake-dwellings in the Alj)ine lowlands.
Whereas in cave districts
the caves and grottos often
served the men of the later
Stone Age as temporary and
even as piermanent winter dwellings, in the
watery valleys of Switzerland the Neolithic
population built its huts on foundations of
piles in lakes and bogs. In that period we
have to imagine the Alpine lowlands still
extensively covered with woods and full of
wild beasts ; at that time the huts
standing on piles in the water must have
afforded their inhabitants a security such
as scarcely any other place could have
given. The first founders and inhabitants
of settlements of pile-dwellings in Switzer-
land belong to the pure Stone Period.
In spite of their lake-dwellings the old
Neolithic men of Switzerland appear to
have possessed almost all the important
domestic animals, but they also knew and
practised agriculture. They lived by cattle-
rearing, agriculture, hunting, and fishing,
and on wild fruit and all that the plant
world freely offered in the way of eataliles.
Their clothing consisted ])artly of skins,
but partly also of stuffs, the majority of
which .seem to have been prepared from
flax.
The endeavour of the .settlers to live
together in lasting homes protected from
. . surjirises, and in large num-
Beginnings ^^^.^.^^ -^ ^^ unmistakable proof
s *■ lO A ^^^'^^ they were aware of the
advantages of a settled mode of
life, and that we have not to imagine the
inhabitants of the pile-dwellings as nomadic
herdsmen, and still le.ss as a regular race
of hunters and fishermen. The permanent
concentration of a large number of
individuals at the same ]X)int, and of
hundreds of families in neighbouring inlets
of the lakes, could not have taken jilace if
164
there had not been through all the seasons
a regular supply of provisions derived
principally from cattle-rearing and agri-
culture, and if there had not existed the
elements of social order. Even the establish-
ment of the lake-settlement itself is not
possible for the individual man ; a large
commvmity must have here worked with a
common plan and purpose. Herodotus
describes a pile-village in Lake Prosias, in
Thracia, which was inhal)ited by Pieones,
who defended it successfully against the
Persian general Megabazos. The scaffold
on which the huts were built stood on high
piles in the middle of the lake ; it was
connected with the bank only by a single,
easily removable bridge. Herodotus says :
The piles on which the scaffolds rest were
erected in olden times by the citizens in a
body ; the enlargement of the lake-settle-
ment took place later, acconling as it was
necessitated by the formation of new
families.
According to the large numl er of lake-
dwellings of the Stone Age in the Alpine
lowlands, and according to the
^ * ^ large quantity of j)roducts of
aTh ^^ primitive industry that have
" been found there, centuries
must have elapsed between the moment
when the first settlers rammed in the piles
on which to build their dwellings and the
end of the Stone Period.
The huts of the settlements of the Stone
Age were j^artly rovmd and partly quad-
rangular, and, like the pile-hut discovered
by Frank near Schussenried, were divided
into two compartments — one for the cattle,
and the other, with a hearth built of
stones, for the dwelling of man. The floor
of the hut was made of round timber
with a mud foundation, and perhaps
also with a mud flooring ; in Frank's
hut the walls were formed of split tree-
trunks, standing vertically with the split
sides turned inward, firmly put together
between corner jwsts. The round huts
had walls of roughly intertwined branches,
covered with clay inside and out ; of this
clay-plaster numerous pieces have been
})reserved, hardened by fire, with the marks
THE HOME LIFE OF PRIMITIVE FOLK
of the branches. The pile huts of the lakes
were connected with the waTer by block
or rung ladders. Victor Cross found such
a ladder in one of the oldest stations ;
it consisted of a long oak pole provided
at fairly regular intervals with holes
in which the rungs were inserted.
Of special importance in estimating the
degree of civilisation attained by the
lake-dwellers of the Stone Age are the
remains of spinning and weaving imple-
ments and of webs and textile fabrics,
plaited work, etc. Flax has been found
wound on the implements made of ribs,
that we mentioned above as flax combs ;
we have also mentioned the fixing of blades
with liax, or threads made of it, and
the numerous wide and narrow nets made
of threads. For spinning the thread,
spindles were used just like those of the
present day, a spindle-stick of wood
being fastened into a spinning-whorl
made of stone, deer-horn, or
clay. The distaff was probably
not yet known ; a loom has
not yet been found, either ; but
numerous weaver's weights, which served
for spinning the threads, have been. Excel-
lent webs, some of them twilled, were
produced, of which we have many frag-
ments. Remains of mats and baskets prove
that those were manufactured from the
In a
Stone Age
Kitchen
First
Traces of
Textiles
materials still employed at the present
day. Corn was baked into a kind of bread
consisting of coarsely ground grains. The
millstones that were used for grinding the
corn are found in large numbers. They
are rather worn, hollowed slabs of stone,
and smaller flat stones rounded
on the top, with which the
grains of corn were crushed on
the larger slabs. Some of the
kitchen utensils we find already much
improved. Large and small pots for stor-
ing purposes, earthen cooking pots, and
dishes, and large wooden spoons and twirl-
ing-sticks — the latter probably for churn-
ing— have been preserved. Vessels like
strainers served for making cheese ; they
are pots in whose sides and bottoms a
number of small holes were made for
pouring off the whey from the cheese.
Here, in the fully developed Neolithic
Period we find the early inhabitants of
Switzerland to be a settled agricultural and
farming population. Although hunting
and fishing still furnished an important
part of their food, so that in some places
even more deer bones have been found
among the cooking remains than bones of
the ox, yet the milk, cheese, and butter of
the cows, sheep, and goats, the tiesh of these
and of the hog, and bread and fruit, already
formed the basis of their subsistence.
A PRIMITIVE STYLE OF DWELLING STILL WIDESPREAD IN SAVAGE LANDS
The lakedweUings still in use in New Guinea, illustrated in this reproduction from an old work,
D'Urville's "Voyage of the Astrolabe," are exactly like the lake dwelhngs of prehistoric Europe.
165
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
The results of cave research are almost as
rich and varied as the results- yielded by
the study of the lake-dwellings in their bear-
ing on the Neohthic stratum. Where there
is a Drift stratum in the cave-earth the con-
fusion of Palaeolithic and Neolithic objects
can, as we have said, scarcely be avoided.
But there are numerous grottos and small
caves in which the Neolithic
Man Learmng g^j-atum is the oldest, SO that
* ^ r I • • mistakes are out of the ques-
Art of Living ^.^^ j^ ^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^^^ ^f
such places in the cave district of the Fran-
conian-Bavarian Jura the conditions under
which finds have been made in the Neo-
lithic stratum have proved almost as pure
and unmixed as in the lake-dwellings.
The cave-dweller'^ of the later Stone Age
in the Franconian Jura were, like the
Swiss lake-dwellers of the Stone Age,
mainly a pastoral race. They possessed
all the important domestic animals that
the latter possessed — dog, cow, horse,
sheep, goat, pig — and likewise practised
agriculture, or, at any rate, ffax-growing ;
at the same time hunting and fishing formed
a considerable part of their means of sub-
sistence. So that, not only on artificial
pile-works on the shores of lakes, but
also on the banks of South German rivers,
there formerly lived a race which, al-
though still mainly restricted to hunting
and fishing, and using no metal, but
exclusively stone and bone tools, already
practised cattle-breeding and primitive
agriculture, and was able to increase the
means of existence afforded it by Nature
by the first technical arts — by the chipping
and grinding of stone instruments, bone
carving, and, above all., pottery-making,
tanning, and the arts of sowing, weav-
ing and plaiting.
Of most importance, as showing the
state of civilisation of the Neolithic rock-
dwellers, are the numerous articles carved
from bone that must be looked upon as
instruments for weaving and net-knitting.
For the latter purpose there
were large, finely-smoothed
bone crochet-needles, some of
them carved from the rib of a
large ruminant. The handle-end is
smoothed by use, and the end with the
hook is rounded from the same cause.
The end is frequently perforated, so that
it might be hung up. Still more numerous
were shuttles of various forms.
According to the numerous finds of
perforated clay weaver's weights, the
i66
Beginning
of Weaving
and Knitting
loom, like that of the lake-dwellers, must
have been like the ancient implement
that, according to Montelius, was in use
on the Faroe Islands a comparatively
short time ago. Spinning-whorls are very
numerous, being partly fiat, round discs
of bone pierced in the centre, and partly
thick bone rings or large beads of bone
and deer-horn and flat burr-pieces of deer-
antlers.
It was formerly thought that the Neo-
lithic Europeans did not possess the arts
of engraving and carving animals and
human figures which the Palaeolithic Men
had understood in such conspicuous
manner. The progress of research has
now produced more and more proof that
in the later Stone Age the arts, of carving
and engraving had not died out. We have
the celebrated amber carvings of the
later Stone Age from the Kurisches Haff,
near Schwarzort, some of which probably
served a religious purpose ; those of ivory,
bone, stalactite, etc., from the caves of
France and the Polish Jura ; the figures
from Butmir, and other evidences.
In Italy, in Lombardy, and Emilia,
another group of settlements of the Stone
Age has been found, which
again exhibit the civilisation
and all other signs of the
later Stone Age, and in many
respects more closely resemble the lake-
dwellings than do the cave-dwellings.
These aie the " terramare," whose inhabi-
tants, however, had already to some extent
advanced to the use of bronze. A sharp
division of strata into habitation of the
pure Stone Age and habitation of the Metal
Age has not yet been made. The huts stood
on pile-work on dry land, the piles being
six to ten feet high ; the whole settlement
was fortified with trench and rampart,
generally with palisades, and was of an
oblong or oval plan. Besides many
natural and artificial caves in Italy the
dwelling-pits, which may formerly have
borne the superstructure of a hut, also
belong to the pure Stone Age.
Such dwelling-pits of the Stone Age
seem to have been distributed all over
Europe. Burnt wall-plaster with impres-
sions of interwoven twigs, has frequently
been found near or in the pits, doul^tless
indicating hut-building. In Mecklenburg,
where the dwelling-pits were first carefully
examined by Liesch, they have a circular
outline of ten to fifteen yards, and are five
to six and a half feet deep. At the bottom
Fortified
Settlements in
Stone Age
LAKE-DWELLERS RETURNING FROM THE HUNT IN THEIR DUG-OUT CANOES
From a painting by Hippolyte Coutau, in the Geneva Museum.
167
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
of the pit lie burnt and blackened stones,
hearthstones, charcoal, potsherds, broken
bones of animals, and a few stone imple-
ments, the latter being mostly found in
larger numbers in the vicinity of the
dwellings. The same circular dwelling-
pits of the Stone Age are found in France.
Smaller hearth-pits were recently found in
very large numbers in the
range Spessart, in Bavaria, with hun-
Homes of '^
Early Man
dreds of stone hatchets and
perforated axe-hammers, some
ot the former being very finely made of
jadeite.
During the Neolithic Period dwellings
were frequently made on heights, and it
.seems that even at that time they were to
a certain extent walled round and fortified.
Such settlements are numerous all over
Southern and Central Germany, in Austria-
Hungary, especially in the coast-country,
and in Italy and France. Many of these
stations belong purely to the Stone Age ;
indeed, the majority were inhabited
already during the Stone Age, and furnish
the typical Neolithic relics familiar from
the foregoing. On the other hand, they con-
tinue to be inhabited even in the later metal
periods, and in some cases right down
to modern times. The rock near Clausen,
in the Eisack valley, in the Tyrol, on which
the large Siiben monastery now stands, was
a mediaeval castle, and during the times of
the Romans a fortified settlement called
Sobona stood there ; and when excava-
tions were made in 1895, for adding new
buildings to the monastery, a well-ground
stone hatchet of the later Stone Age came
to light. On many hills in Central
Germany are found traces of the ancient
presence of men who lived on them or
assem])]ed on them for sacrificial feasts ;
the earth is coloured black by charred
remains and organic influences, and this
" black earth on heights and hills "
contains frequently, as we have said, the
traces of Neolithic men. In Italy, many
finds on such heights — for in-
stance, those made on the small
castle-hill near Imola — seem to
exhibit that stage of the Stone
Age that is missing in the terramare, and
that precedes the beginning of the Metal
Age of the terramare, but corresponds to
it in every essential except in the possession
of metal.
But the view that is opened up is still
wider. The prehistoric times of the New
World also exhibit a Neolithic stage,
168
America
before
History
The
Foundations
corresponding to that of Europe, as the
basis of the further development of the
ancient civilised lands of America. And
where a higher civilisation did not develop
autochthonously in America, European
discoverers found the Neolithic civilisation
still in active existence, as they did in the
whole Australian world. Accordingly in
these vast regions, which have never risen
above the Stone Age of themselves, the
same stage of civilisation which in the old
civilised lands belongs to a grey, im-
memorial, prehistoric period, here stands
in the broad light of historic times. The
study of modern tribes in an age of stone
throws many a ray of light on the con-
ditions of the prehistoric Stone Age ;
and this study, on the other hand, shows
us that the primitive conditions of civil-
isation of those tribes stand for a general
stage of transition in the development
of all mankind.
The lake-dwelling stations, and the
land settlements resembling them, prove
of themselves how far the culture of the
early inhabitants of Europe was advanced
even in that ancient period which was for-
merly imagined to be scarcely
raised above half-animal con-
. „ . ditions. Such structures could
not be erected unless men
combined into large social communi-
ties, which is indeed indicated by the
very fact of the number of dwellings that
were crowded into a comparatively small
space. For the first ramming-in of the
pile-works a large number of men working
together on a common plan was absolutely
necessary. The same ai')]ilies to the con-
struction of the artificial islands, protected
by pile-works and partly resting on piles,
termed "crannoges" by Irish archaeologists,
and to the Italian villages called " terra-
mare," which likewise once rested on
piles and were protected by ditches.
From the extent of the pile-works we are
able to estimate the number of the former
inhabitants of the settlements supported
by them. Quite as clear an idea of the
number of the former inhabitants is also
given by the early circumvallations on
the tops of hills and shoulders of rock,
which were likewise made and inhabited
during the Stone Age.
The co-operation of a large number of
men for a common j)urj)ose is also shown
in the often huge stone structures to which,
on account of the size of the stones
employed in their construction, the name
THE FAMOUS GIANT CHAMBER NEAR ROSKILDE IN DENMARK
"That the men of the later Stone Age had developed a considerable degree of culture is proved by s'lch
remains as these. The erection of these giant chambers must have called for a vast amount of co-operation,
skill, and ingenuity. The means whereby the massive stones were placed into position, and so fixed to
withstand the shocks of thousands of years, have not yet been satisfactorily explained by archaeology.
" megalithic " structures, or gigantic stone
structures, has been given. In Northern
Europe they, too, belong to the Stone Age
proper. The majority of these gigantic
structures were originally tombs ; the
principle on which they are built is often
repeated even in far less imposing tombs.
The stone blocks of which these gigantic
structures are piled now often lie bare.
Large stones placed crosswise, which
represent, as it were, the side-walls of a
room, supj)ort a roof of one or several
" covering-stones " of occasionally colossal
size. For the erection of these in their
present position without the technical
resources at the disposal of modern
builders, human strength appears inade-
quate ; in popular opinion only giants
could have made such structures. Some
of the stones are really so large, and the
covering-stones especially so enormous,
that these buildings have defied destruc-
tion, for thousands of years, by their very
weight.
In the time of their construction these
giants' graves were mostly buried under
mounds. They were the inner structures
of large tumuli, in which the reverence
of the men of the Stone Age once buried
its heroes. One of the finest " giant's
chambers " is probably that near Om,
in the neighbourhood of Roskilde, in
Denmark. The building material consists
merely of erratic stone blocks of enormous
size. The rough blocks were mostly set
up by the side of one another, without
any further working, so as to support one
another as far as possible ; at the same
time all of them, as Sophus IMliller observes,
are slightly inclined inward, so that they
are kept more firmly in position by their
own weight. The stones thus erected,
forming the parallel side-walls of the
whole structure, stand so far apart that
a huge erratic block, reaching from one
wall to the other, could be placed on
them as a roof. The distance between
the side-walls of the giant's chambers
attains a maximum of eight to nine feet ;
the covering-stones placed on them are
some ten to eleven feet long. The pressure
of the covering-stones from above helps
169
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
considerably to hold the whole struc-
ture together. In order to distribute
the pressure of the covering-stones
regularly, smaller stones were carefully
inserted under the wall-stones where
they had to stand on the ground. How
exactly these proportions of weight
were judged is proved by the fact
that these structures of heavy and
irregular stones, resting on their
natural, differently shaped sides and
edges, have held together until the
present day. The inner walls of
the chambers were made as care-
fully as possible. Where, as on the
outside, the rough and irregular
form of the stone block projects,
either the naturally smooth side was
turned inward or the roughness was
chipped off.
These are the beginnings of a real
architecture, seen also in the regu-
lar wedging with small stones of the
spaces left between the wall-stones and
covering-stones and between the wall-
stones themselves. These small stones
were frequently built in, in regular
wall-like layers. Sandstone was often
used for the purpose, being more easily
split into regular pieces, which gave
this masonry a still more pleasing ap-
pearance. The number of stone blocks
used for the wall-sides varies according
to the size of the giant's chambers, as
does also the number of covering-
stones. For smaller chambers, with six
to nine wall-stones, two or three cover-
ing-stones were required. But far
larger stone chambers occur, as many
as seventeen wall-stones having been
counted. Such large chambers require
a whole row of covering-stones be-
side one another. The door-opening
often shows a special regard for
architectonics. The two door-post
stones are rather lower than the other
wall-stones ; on them a stone was
laid horizontally, which kept them
apart and distributed the pressure
of the covering-stone equally on both
posts.
Very often there was also a stone as
a threshold. Leading to the door is a
low passage, made in similar manner
to the chamber, but of far smaller
stones. The passage is only high
enough to allow one to creep through,
whereas the chamber itself is about as
high as a man, so that one could stand
170
^%-^x.^^r^!^S0
"THE MERCHANTS' TABLE": AN IMMENSE DOLMEN ERECTED IN THE STONE AGE
Archaeologists are not entirely agreed as to the purpose of these dolmens. They were more likely graves, or
chambers associated with religious rites, than residences. This example is at Locmariaquer, near Carnac, in Brittany.
upright in most of them. Larger stone
chambers are rarely without this pas-
sage, and from it such grave-structures
have been named " passage-graves."
Besides the building-in of small stones,
the holes still re-
maining between the
stones were also
coated over on the
outside with mud to
keep the rain-water
from soaking in ;
mud was also fre-
quently used for
making a rough
plaster floor for the
chamber if the
natural floor could
not be made level
enough. On the floor
is frequently found a
compact layer of
small flints, or a
regular pavement of
fiat stones, often
rough-hewn, or
roundish stones fit-
ting one another as
nearly as possible,
which were then
probably also
covered with a thick
layer of mud.
So that in these
INTERIOR OF THE "MERCHANTS' TABLE"
giant's chambers we This is the interior of the above dolmen. It will be seen that
bavp rpal bnilrlinp''; the earth has slowly risen a great height since it was erected,
lldvc lCd,l UUlIUlIlgb, nearly covering the dolmen, thus indicating immense age.
which imply high The principal supporting stone is covered with sculpture.
technical accomplishments and have pre-
served for us the usual form of the
dwellings of those early times. In what
manner the huge covering-stones were
placed on the side-walls of the giant's
chambers is a pro-
blem still unsolved.
Doubtless many
hands were occu-
pied on such struc-
tures ; and the
history of building
teaches us that with
the proper use of
human strength — as,
for instance, in
ancient Egypt —
great weights can be
raised and placed in
position with very
simple tools — round
pieces of wood as
rollers, ropes, and
handspikes.
Some of these
giant's chambers,
which were origin-
ally enclosed in
mounds or barrows,
are still preserved at
the present day, and
splendidly too. Very
often the chamber
was quite covered
with earth outside ;
it then formed the
centre of what was
171
THE HOME LIFE OF PRIMITIVE FOLK
generally a circular barrow, often regular
small hills ten to fifteen feet high and fre-
quently over ninety feet in circumference.
The corpses were buried, not cremated.
They were frequently in a crouching
attitude, or that of a sleeper lying side-
ways with the legs drawn up to the body.
The smaller graves often represent single
interments ; .the larger or largest ones are
mostly family tombs, in which numerous
corpses were interred one after the other
at different times. But this repeated use
of the graves is found also with smaller
ones, and even with stone cists. Only
the last corpse then lies in a normal
position, while, through the repeated
opening of the grave and the later inter-
ments, the skeletons belonging to pre-
viously interred corpses appear more or
less disturbed or intentionally put aside.
The skulls of the corpses interred in the Neo-
lithic graves are well formed, their size indi-
cating a very considerable brain develop-
ment. The corpses were no bigger than the
present inhabitants of the same districts,
and the form of the head corresponds partly
with that of the present population of those
countries. Nor do the skeletons otherwise
differ from those of modern men.
In America, also, gigantic structures were
erected by the aborigines who lived in the
Stone Age, to commemorate and to protect
their dead. They consist partly of large
mounds of stones and earth, which are like-
wise often regular small hills, and partly of
stone structures reminding one of the giants'
chambers. The majority of the mounds
were doubtless mainly sepulchral ; others
may have been temple-hills or sacrificial
mounds, defensive works or observatories.
The objects buried with the occupants
belong mostly to the Neolithic Period,
and consist chiefly of stone weapons and
tools, some rude, but others finely worked
and polished. Some are of pure natural
copper, which was beaten into shape cold
with stone hammers. Besides these, and
ornaments and pottery, an American
specialty is found in the form of tobacco-
pipes carved from stone, some of which
give interesting representations of men
and animals ; this seems to prove that
tobacco also played a part in the American
funeral rites of those times.
The graves of the Neolithic Period not
only indicate that mankind generally was
endowed with the same gifts as regards the
first principles of the art of building, but
they also afford us a glimpse of the mental
life of that period of civihsation which
at a more or less distant period was spread
over the whole earth. What is so charac-
teristic is the affectionate care for the
corpse, for whose protection no amount of
labour and trouble appeared too great. We
can have no doubt that this reverence was
based on a belief in the immortality of the
soul — a belief which we find also" at the
present day among the most backward and
abandoned "savages." That the pre-
HOW STONE AGE MAN WAS BURIED
Photogrraph of an actual skeleton, in position of burial,
taken from a prehistoric mound grave in North America.
historic men of the Stone Age held this
belief is proved by the ornaments, weapons,
implements, and food placed with the dead
for use in the next world. Their burial cus-
toms certainly express a kind of worship
of departed souls which has played and
still plays so important a part in the
religious ideas of all primitive peoples, and
is one of the oldest fundamental notions
common to mankind.
173
L
174
THE WORLD
BEFORE
HISTORY— VI
Professor
JOHANNES
RANKE
WHEN HISTORY WAS DAWNING
THE discovery of Drift Man, his distinc-
tion from man of the later Stone Age,
the investigation of the Palaeohthic and
Neohthic strata of culture of Europe and of
the whole earth, and the scientific recon-
struction of the earliest forms of civilisa-
tion based on these, are due solely to
the natural-science method of research.
It was only when the exact methods of
palaeontology and geology had been brought
to bear with all their rigour on the study
of ancient man by savants schooled in
natural science that solid results were
obtained. On this sure foundation the
science of history now continues building,
and uses, even for the later periods, so far
as recorded information is not available,
and to supplement it, the same methods of
palaeontology and natural science which
were applied so successfully to the earliest
stages of the evolution of mankind.
The first point is to collect the rehcs
of the periods of the evolution of culture
which follow on the later
Time-Table _ g^^^^ j^ ^^^ ^^ separate
of Prehistoric ^^^^ according to geological
Periods strata, uninfluenced by those
older pseudo-historic fancies by which the
deepening of our historical knowledge has so
long been hindered. By carefully separat-
ing and tracing the earth's strata till we
come to those that furnish remains of times
recorded in history, it has been possible
to establish first a relative chronology of
the so-called later prehistoric periods of
Central Europe, whose offshoots pass
immediately into recorded history.
By digging, after the same method of
palaeontological science, through stratum
after stratum in the oldest centres of culture,
especially in the Mediterranean countries,
and by arranging the products by strata —
uninfluenced by historical hypotheses —
after the same natural-science method of
research which has produced such remark-
able results in Central Europe, the most
surprising conformity in the evolution of
culture in widely remote regions has been
shown. It was found that in the Medi-
terranean countries, and also in Egypt and
Babylonia, forms of culture already belong
to the time of real history which were first
recognised in Central Europe as pre-
liminary prehistoric stages of historical
strata ; so that it was possible also to
establish an absolute historical chronology
for those instead of the relative prehistoric
one.
Thus times which, as regards Central
Europe, were hitherto wrapped in pre-
historic night are enlightened by
Europe s ^ history. Although, as regards
Prehistoric ^g^^ral and Northern Europe,
^^ we cannot name the peoples who
were the bearers of those forms of culture,
and although we disdain to give them a
premature nomenclature of hypothetical
names, yet their conditions of life and
culture and the progressive development
of these, in manifold contact and inter-
course with neighbouring and even far
remote historic peoples and periods, have
risen from the darkness of thousands of
years ; and their relation in time to the
latter has been recognised.
Thus prehistoric times have themselves
become history. The historical account
of every single region has henceforth to
begin with the description of the oldest
antiquities of the soil that tell of man's
habitation, in order thereby to obtain the
chronological connection with the evolu-
tion of the history of mankind generally.
That is the palaeontological method of
historical research.
The palaeontology of man has proved the
Stone Age to be a general primary stage
of culture for the whole human race.
All further general progress in culture
was affected by the discovery of the art of
metal-working — the extraction
Landmarks ^j ^^^ metals from their ores
° ^'^"^ and the casting and forging of
Culture ^^^^^ jy^^ ^^^^^ ^j^^ ^^^gg^
eras of culture are the Metal Ages, as
opposed to the Stone Ages. It is not the
use of metal in itself, but the above-
mentioned metallurgical arts, that form
the criterion of the advance of culture
beyond the bounds of the Stone Age.
Where, as in some parts of America, native
copper was found in abundance, this red
^75
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
malleable mineral could probably be
worked in the same way as stone, without
any further progress necessarily develop-
ing therefrom. The same may apply to
m e t eor-iron,
which is said to
have been used
for arrows, to-
gether with
stone points, by
American tribes
who were other-
wise in the age
of stone and but
poorly civilised.
In civilised
lands it is chieHy
metal casting
and the forging
of the heated
metal which
have made it
possible to pro-
duce better wea-
pons and tools
and more valu-
able ornaments.
The worked
metals are first
copper, then the
alloy of copper
and tin that
bears the name
of classical
bronze, and to these are soon added gold
and — especially in districts rich in the
metal, as in Spain — silver. Later on the
extraction of iron from its ores and the
forging of that metal are discovered.
According to this course of metallurgical
progress the first metal period is distin-
guished as the Bronze Period, which is
begun by a Copper Period lasting more
or less long in different places. The second
or later metal period is the Iron Period, in
which we are living at the present day.
In the course of time, by gradually dis-
placing bronze and copper from the rank
of metals worked for weapons and tools,
this Iron Age has developed to its present
stage.
In Central Europe the pile-dwellings in
the lakes of Western Switzerland again
present us with specially clear and unin-
terrupted series of illustrations of the
progress of culture from the Stone Age to
the Iron Age. Ending the Stone Age, we
find first a period of transition, in which,
while stone continued to be principally
176
Growth of ihe wings
THE TRANSITION FROM STONE TO IRON
This series of diagrams, reproduced from specimens in the British
Museum, by permission of the Trustees, shows how the stone axe-
head was used as the model for the metal axe or celt, and how that in
turn was modified as workers gained experience in the use of the metal
employed, a few ornaments, weapons, and
tools of metal began to be used. This
metal is at first almost exclusively copper,
with only very little bronze ; iron is quite
absent. Copper
objects have
been found in
Western Switzer-
land by Victor
Gross, most
extensively in
Fenel's lake-
dwelling station,
which otherwise
still belongs to
the Stone Age.
The majority of
these are smaU
daggers, formed
after the pattern
of the flint dag-
gers ; some
already possess
rive tings for
fastening the
blade to a
handle. There
are also chisels
and small awls
in bone handles,
beads, and small
ornamental
leaves, and
hatchets of the
form of the simplest stone hatchets, with
the edge hammered out and broadened.
Much has proved the existence of a Copper
Period corresponding to this description
in the lake-dwelling in the Mond See in
Austria, and in Hungary the remains of a
Copper Period are particularly frequent.
Parallel cases also occur in many other
parts of Europe, particularly, as Virchow
has proved, in the Spanish Peninsula, and
in the Stone Age graves of Cujavia in
Prussian Poland. These are the more
im]X)rtant as they are most closely related
to the conditions of culture discovered in
the ancient strata of Hissarlik-Troy.
Further unmistakable analogies occur with
very ancient finds in Cyprus, and probably
even with the oldest remains of Baby-
lonian culture hitherto known. Here, too,
we may include the finds of copper in the
Stone Age of America.
So that in the normal and comj^lete
evolution of culture there seems to be first
a stratum of copper as the connecting link
between the Stone and Metal Ages ; and
WHEN HISTORY WAS DAWNING
this must be missing in those regions in
which progress from the stone to the
metal culture was only brought about at a
relatively later period by external influ-
ences. This applies not only to all modern
races in an age of stone, who obtained
metal in recent times only
The Passing ^j^j-o^gh contact with European
l^^^^ . nations who had been living
Stone Age .^ ^^^ j^.^^ p^^.-^^ f^^ ^^10X1-
sands of years, but, curiously enough, also
to the greater part of Africa, where the use
of iron was prevalent at a prehistoric period.
Just as the modern Stone races passed
straight from the Stone Age into the most
highly-developed Iron Age of the most
advanced culture, so also the stone stratum
of Central and South Africa is immediately
overlaid by a stratum of iron culture,which
was brought there in ancient times, prob-
ably direct from Egypt. As there is in
Egypt and throughout North Africa a
regular development from the Copper-
bronze Period to the complete iron culture,
corresponding to the progress of the
metal cultures of Europe and Asia, the
point of time is thus chronologically
fixed at which this important element
of culture was transmitted from Europe
to the blacks of Central and South Africa.
In Western Switzerland the transition
period of copper is followed without a
gap in the development by the Bronze
Period proper. With the introduction of
bronze all the conditions of life were more
highly developed in the sense of increased
culture. With better tools the stations of
the Bronze Age could be erected at a
greater distance from the bank, often two
hundred to three hundred yards ; the
space they take up is also much greater.
The piles are not only better preserved,
according as the time of their being driven
in more nearly approaches our own, but
they are also better worked, are often
square, and the points that are rammed into
the lake-bottom are better cut. The settle-
ments of the Bronze Age often cover an
area of several hundred square yards,
and are no longer comparatively mean
villages, as in the Stone
Advancing . ^ . ^^^ p-^g settlements
Civilisation in ^^ ^^^ Bronze Age are well-
Bronze Age organised market towns
and even flourishing small cities, where
a certain luxury already prevails. The
products of their industry are graced by
that beauty and elegance of form that
only an advanced civilisation can create.
As in the Stone Age, so also in the Bronze
WEAPONS USED BY MAN IN THE PERIODS OF DAWNING HISTORY
Reproduced chiefly from specimens in the British Museum.
12
177
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Age of Central and Northern Europe,
the most important working-implement,
which was, however, also used as a
weapon, was the axe, or celt. The most
primitive forms of axes, like the above-
mentioned copper axes, still resemble the
simple stone axes : like these, they have
no special contrivance for fastening the
handle. In more developed forms of
axes such contrivances for fastening the
handle appear first in the form of slight
flanges, which become wider and wider ;
finally they develop into regular wings,
which, by curving towards one another,
develop into two almost closed lateral
semi-canals on the upper side of the celt.
used for making their weapons and
tools in the periods of transition, they
still imitate the old forms received from
their forefathers. Just as the first metal
axes of copper are copies of the stone
axes, so also, when iron first became
known, were weapons made of this metal
which corresponded i-n form to the bronze
weapons that had hitherto been used.
The Bronze Period was first proved
to have been a complete form of culture
in the North of Europe — in North Germany
and Scandinavia. We have now suc-
ceeded in establishing the fact that it
was a preliminary stage of the Iron Age, in
locally original development, in all ancient
THE HILL OF TROY, IN WHICH IS RECORDED A WONDERFUL STORY OF MAN'S PROGRESS
Seven towns of Troy were built upon this hill, one above the ruins of the other, the earliest dating from 3000 B.C. ;
and the brilliant excavations of Dr. Henry Schliemann, which have won him immortal fame, have contributed
more to our knowledge of the history of mankind than any other excavations in our time, as on this site is
concentrated a continuous record of man's progress from the late Stone Age to the height of Greek civilisation.
In the hollow celts a simple socket for
the handle was cast in the making ; an
additional means of fastening the handle
was provided in a loop, which also occurs
on winged celts. Besides the celt, or
axe-blade, broad and narrow chisels of
bronze occur in various forms for working
wood. A second chief type of instrument
is the one-edged bronze knife with elegantly
curved back and a handle tongue.
The manner in which iron was found in
the lake-dwellings, as mentioned above,
shows the gradual development of a period
of transition between a Bronze and an
Iron Age. In spite of the difference
in the material which the lake-dwellers
178
centres of culture. It is very remarkable
that the civihsed states of the New World
also employed only copper and bronze
as working metals. Thus the Peruvians
did not know iron any more than the
other American peoples until they came
in contact with European influences.
Besides copper and bronze they had tin
and lead, gold and silver. The Peruvian
bronzes contain silver to the extent of
five to ten per cent. There are axes or
celts of bronze similar to the rudest of the
first European beginnings in metal cor-
responding in form to the simple stone axe.
Many of the other forms of weapons
and implements famiUar in the Bronze
WHEN i
)RY WAS DAWNING
Age of the Old
World were also
made of bronze
or copper in
America ; semi-
lunar knives with
a handle in the
middle, lance-
heads and arrow-
heads, swords,
war-clubs like
morning stars,
etc. At the same
time weapons
and implements
of stone still
remained in use.
In the Old
World progress
beyond bronze is
everywhere due
to iron.
One place has
been found and
most completely investigated after the
method of palaeontological research, with
all the help afforded by archaeological and
historical science, where, in overlying geo-
logical strata, the evidences have been
found of a progressive development of cul-
ture from the end of the Stone Age down to
the brilliant days of Graeco-Roman history.
A WINE MERCHANT'S CELLAR IN ANCIENT TROY
Nine colossal earthen jars were discovered by Dr. Schliemann in the depths of the Temple rf
Athena. They had evidently belonged to some wine merchant's cellar in the pre-Hellenic period.
There the chronological connection has
been obtained, not only for the metal
periods, but also for the end of the Neolithic
Period. This most important place is Troy,
the citadel-hih of Hissarlik, by the excava-
tion of which Henry Schliemann has won
immortal fame. Schliemann's excavations,
supplemented and completed in deci-
sive manner by
D o r p f e 1 d , have
brought about the
most important
advancement of the
history of mankind
that our age can
show.
Virchow's name
is inseparably
associated with
Schliemann's.
Furtwangler, in his
account, based on
jiersonal observa-
tion, of the results
of the excavations
at Troy, has accom-
plished the great
service of exactly
determining the
chronological con-
nections of the pre-
historic with the
historic eras, and
thereby linking the
former to history.
179
EXCAVATIONS IN THE TEMPLE OF ATHENA AT TROY
Dr. Schliemann's discoveries in the ruins of this temple and the ruins of older buildings
beneath it were among the richest in the entire annals of archaeological research.
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
On the spot on which tradition placed
Homeric Troy (says Furtwiingler) there really
has stood a stately citadel, which was con-
temporaneous with the goklenage of Mycenae,
the epoch of the Agamemnon of legend, was
intimately related to Mycenaean culture, and
at the same time corresponds most exactly to
the idea of Troy underlying the old epic.
The citadel-hill of Troy terminates a
ridge of heights stretching westward from
Mount Ida, almost parallel to
^^"'^'^ the Hellespont, and slopes
Oeum steeply into the Trojan plain
^^ ' or the valley of the Scamander.
The natural hill itself is not very high, but
it was overlaid by enormous layers of ruins
of buildings and walls, whereby it has been
consideralily increased not only in height,
but also in breadth. Stratum after stratum
lies one u})on the other like the leaves of
a bud, so that the history of the habitation
of this venerable place from the most
ancient times can be read from these strata
which have been o})ened up by Schliemann
and Dorpfeld, as from the leaves of a book.
The original ground of the hill-plateau now
lies some sixty feet above the plain, but the
latter may have been raised something like
sixteen to twenty feet by alluvial deposits
since the Trojan War. The whole stratum
of ruins lying on the original ground of the
hill, which Schliemann opened up, amounts
to about fifty-two and a half feet. Schlie-
mann distinguished seven or eight different
layers or strata, corresponding to as many
towns which were successively built on
this hill, one on the ruins of the other.
The lowest stratum, lying immediately
on the original ground, belongs accordingly
to the oldest, or first town, on the citadel-
hill of Troy. Furtwangler says :
By moderate computation this settle-
ment must belong to the first half of the
third millennium before Christ, bul? it may
very well date back even to the fourth
millennium. The inhabitants already used
copper implements in addition to stone ones.
Their whole culture is most closely connected
with that which prevailed in Central Europe
during the Copper Period. Clay
The First vessels of the Copper Period from
Town Lake Mond, in Austria, agree
of Troy completely with those of the first
Trojan town. Troy represents
only an offshoot of Central European cul-
ture, and its inhabitants were in all prob-
ability of European origin.
We have already learned that the Copper
Period is the end of the Neolithic Period
and the beginning of the Metal Age.
In the first Trojan town there is still
extraordinarily little metal used, the axes,
i8o
hatchets, knives, and saws still being
of stone, of the familiar Central European
types, and of the same materials, among
which nephrite is particularly frequent.
Other materials are serpentine, diorite,
porphyry, hematite, flint, etc.
The forms of these implements corre-
spond entirely to those of the later Stone
Age of Europe. The character of the
ceramics also conforms in many respects,
according to Virchow, to that of the Euro-
pean Stone Age ; and the Stone Age finds
at Butmir, in Bosnia, and similar ones in
Transylvania seem especially to offer close
analogies. It would be a highly important
step toward connecting history with the
Neolithic Period if the first town could be
even more closely investigated, and perhaps
more sharply divided from that second
stratum which lies between it and the
stratum described by Schliemann as the
second or burnt city, and which Schlie-
mann afterward separated into two strata,
corresponding to two towns. Perhaps the
metal comes only from the second or
higher stratum under the burnt city. In
that case the oldest would belong purely
to the Stone Age. The ceramics
^ "? would seem to contradict
„ *"* , °, this. Furtwangler continues :
Troy s ulory "
High above the first town, a
deep layer of debris, is the level surface of
the second town, which must at least be
dated back to the second half of the third
millennium before Christ. It was the first
period of Troy's glory. Mighty walls protected
the citadel. Three different building periods
may be distinguished. The walls were brought
out a long way and strengthened, and
magnificent new gates were built. During the
third period of this second city a prince,
fond of splendour, had the old narrow gate-
way replaced by magnificent propylaea and
a large hall-erection with a vestibule. A
great conflagration destroyed his citadel.
A treasure was found by Schliemann — he
called it Priam's treasure — in the upper part
of the citadel wall, which was made of straw
bricks. The tools of the second city are still
partly of stone, but also partly of bronze, so
that they already belong to the Bronze Age.
The general character of culture is,
according to Furtwangler, still essentially
Central European. And yet many an indi-
viduality has developed, and the influence
of Babylonian culture is everywhere
apparent, although it does not go very deep.
To this influence our authority chiefly
attributes the occurrence of a few pots
turned on the wheel, especially flat dishes ;
for the potter's wheel was still quite
THE EXCAVATIONS AT T.OV : --^-^'-^ -"^T-^. Z.'"::,:^^:^"!.
k™5iiFffi&"^^£si^'^-^^^
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
unknown at that time in Europe, and even
at a post so far advanced toward the East
as Cyprus, while in Egypt and Babylonia
it had been in use from the earliest times.
In this period also Troy inclines more to
Central Europe as its centre of gravity,
but remains far behind the peculiar
development that bronze work attained
there ; in the metal tools no advance is
made on the forms of the Copper
Period. Into any close relation
with Cyprus it does not come ;
only the basis of their culture
is common to both. But this basis had a
wide range, relics from German districts
being often more closely related to the
Trojan ones than are those from Cyprus.
The brilliant period of the second city-
is followed by a long period of decline for
Troy. Ruins are piled upon ruins, walls
rise upon walls, but each poorer than the
others ; no new citadel walls, no gates, no
palaces belong to this period, in which three
The Early
Culture
of Troy
TROY;
The top of the tower is z6 ft
foundation is on the rock 46 ft.
182
THE GREAT TOWER OF ILIUM
below the surface of the hill. The
deep ; the height of the tower is 20 ft.
strata — the third, fourth, and fifth towns —
are distinguished. The first half of the second
millennium before Christ must at least be
regarded as the time of this deposit. The in-
habitants evidently remained the same, and
their culture is that of the second city. But
no progress was made ; nothing but stagna-
tion ; the same forms of vessels continue to
be made, the same decorated whorls.
Naturally, no active intercourse with abroad
could develop in this period. And yet this
was the time when an active civilised life
began to develop on the islands of the ^gean
Sea and on the east coast of Greece, which
was to bloom in all its splendour in the
following period. To this time the finds at
Thera belong, where the pottery, all turned
on the wheel, is already painted with a so-
called varnish colour which shines like metal,
and in which plants, flowers, and animals are
treated in quite a new and promising natural-
istic style hitherto unheard of in Europe.
In Cyprus, too, the decoration of pottery
developed exceedingly in wealth and variety
in this period of the Bronze Age. Troy, on
the other hand, is poor and degenerate.
But a new period of prospe-
rity arrived for Troy, too ;
this is the sixth town. Rich
and powerful princes again
ruled in this citadel. They en-
larged it far beyond its former
compass. They built strong
new walls — the old ones had
long since sunk in ruins —
not of small stones and straw
bricks as before, but of large,
smooth blocks, and gates and
turrets. They did not have
the sloping mound of ruins
levelled, as the lords .of the
second city had done ; they
let the new buildings rise in
terraces, on the ruins of the
old ; stately mansions with
wide, deep halls, covered the
acropolis. Constant inter-
course existed with the princes
of Greece, who at that time —
the second half of the second
millennium before Christ —
built their citadels with
Cyclopean walls. The Trojans
employed the same peculiar,
constantly-recurring small
projections in their walls that
we find in a Mycenaean town
on Lake Copais in Boeotia.
And, above all, the Trojans
now provided themselves with
those beautiful vessels pain-
ted with shining colour that
characteri.se Mycenaean cul-
ture in Greece, and whose
natural style had so wonder-
fully developed there on the
basis of the attempts that we
found at Thera. In Troy these
THE TREASURE OF PRIAM. KING OF TROY : A COLLECTION REVEALED BY THE EXCAVATIONS
This remarkable collection of regal treasure comprises the key of ^^f, treasure-housejat top of pj^^^
bronze are displayed beneath, and on the floor are a vessel, a cauldron and a shield, all maae oi copper
things caused some imitation, but the results
remained far behind the originals. The living,
imaginative conception of the natural was
closed to the Trojan ; the home-made pottery
kept, on the whole, to its unpainted vessels,
although these were now almost entirely-
made on the wheel.
Yet what chiefly interests us is. the his-
torical. The sixth town, too, was suddenly
given up, destroyed, and burnt. What follows
it are again only poor settlements. Its
destruction must have taken place about
the end of the Mvcena^an epoch of culture.
The seventh town,' which is built immediately
on the ruins of the sixth, ' shows, already,
other and later culture. It had long been
suspected that a historical kernel was con-
cealed in the legend of Troy— now _ we
have the monumental confirmation. There
really was a Troy, which was strong and
great at the same time as the rulers of
Mycenae, rich in gold and treasure, held
183
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
sway in Greece. And that Troy was des-
troyed— we may now safely affirm, from
this a?;rcement between reUcs and legend — by
Greek princes of the Mycenaean epoch, whom
the legend calls Agamemnon and his men.
The seventh and eighth towns, built
soon after the destruction of the sixth,
show an interruption in the intercourse
with Greece. There the Mycenaean period
was broken by the displacement of peoples
known as the Doric migration, and that
rich civilised life was replaced by a relapse
into the semi-barbaric conditions of the
North. In Troy, too, we perceive a period
of decline, " a relapse into a stage long
since past ; black hand-made vessels,
which in their form and decoration are
strikingly like the home-made pots usual
in Italy, especially Etruria and Latium,
in the first part of the first millennium
before Christ." Finally, the seventh town
also furnishes inferiorimported Greek vases
with painting, though coming not from
Grace itself, but from the coast of Asia
Minor, where Greeks had settled in connec-
tion with the Doric migration. " The
JEolic colonisation of Troas brought
Ilium no fresh prosperity. Other places
rose, Troy remained a miserable village.
In the Hellenistic period the sky clears
over Troy. What Alexander intended,
Lysimachus carried out ; he restores
Ilium to the place of a real city with
new walls, and erects a magnificent
temple to Athene on the top of the acro-
polis. . . . Yet artistic creation came
to no real perfection. It was only when the
great men of Rome, mindful of their
Trojan ancestors, began to interest them-
selves in the place, that new life bloomed
on Troy's ruins."
Thus the geological - archaeological
method relates history, merely relying
upon the monuments of the soil, without
requiring written evidences. Pre-history
has here attained its end ; it has become
history. Johannes Ranke
A VIEW SHOWING THE REMAI^KABLE CHARACTER *jx liiL UXc^v/nWoNS AT TROY
S'ome idea of the enormous work involved in unearthing ancient Troy will be gathered from the fact, made
rlcar in this view, that the groiuid-level before excavating was above the height of these buildings. A
deep trench was cut, as shown in the illustration, through the whole hill of Hissarlik, the citadel town.
184
THE GREAT STEPS IN AAN'S
DEVELOPAENT
BY PROFESSOR JOSEPH KOHLER
THE MATERIAL PROGRESS OF MANKIND
HTHE opinion that our own circumstances
•'• and affairs are the only standard for
judging universal history has long been
obsolete. Our day, with its conceptions,
beliefs, hopes, and endeavours, is but a
tiny portion of the past ; for thousands of
years ])eoples have existed who have lived
in other intellectual spheres than ours,
who have pursued other ideals.
The study of history does not consist in
an examination of the past projected, as it
were, into the present ; it is the study of the
j)ast considered as a i)art of the constant
coming and going of men. And in order to
become qualified as historians we must first
of all attain a point of view from which we
may, independently of time, behold history
with all its great events file by ; as though
we were men who had ascended to some
elevation in the universe from which they
could look down upon the whole earth
lying as a unity ...
before them. This
is rendered possible
through the power
of abstraction gained
from a study of his-
tory ; it enables us,
on the one hand, to
ada]it ourselves to
strange times and
beliefs, and, on the
other, to look upon
our own day — all
time to its contem-
porary men — olijct -
tivelv, as a mere houi
of the ages of human
development. We
must learn to escap(»
from the present, to
withdraw oursehc >
from that which \\i
may call the tj'rannx
of our own time.
From universal
history we obtain a
picture of the development of humanity —
that is, the development of the various
active germs or principles inherent in
man. By these are meant the active
principles innate in mankind in the
aggregate, in contradistinction to those
which may exist in single individuals
or in single races.
The result of development is called
" civilisation " — the state of intellectual
being, and of outward, material life,
attained by a people through evolution.
Although spiritual and material culture
flow into each other, they may be separated
to this extent : as a physical being
endowed with senses, man endeavours td
obtain satisfaction of his needs, and strives
for a position in relation to his environ-
ment corresponding with the efforts he has
made to obtain welfare ; as a feeling,
inquiring, spiritual 1
THE PRIMITIVE ART OF WEAVING
The art of weaving arose from plaiting, and soon
developed to perfection, the American Indians and most
primitive peoples of our own day being skilled weavers.
leing he contains
within him an ever-
present desire to fuse
the multitude of
sejiarate impressions
he receives into unity,
and to struggle for-
ward until he arrives
at a conception of the
world and of life.
" Material civilisa-
tion " is the mode of
life through which
the obstacles opposed
to humanity may
l)e overcome. By
the surmounting of
obstacles is meant
the conqu ering of
enemies, particularly
of hostile animals,
the obtaining ol
means for the preser-
vation of existence,
and the employing of
these means for the
increase of bodily
185
HISTORY OF THE WORLI
, -^ 1
B.C.5000 _
-
-
_ IJuildingof the Pyramids.
_ Karliest monuments to
B.C 4500 I
_ kings in Habylonia.
B.C.4OO0I
_ ki.se of Semitic Baljy-
_
z
Ionian kingdoms.
-
'.<
-
~
~
-
B.C.3500 __
■ . a
fcR-O
( li;dda;an Astronomy.
~
-
Kj "^
-
-
■r ^ ■
-
B.C.300(l_
^^> lu
"
H
-
00 ^ •-
B.C.2300_
0 z
_
-
^m- ' ^
-
-
H^ 0
Khammurabai.
B.C.2000_
■' ^ 2 '^
Assyrian records.
-
^ <:
-
"
> I
-
0 5
'
B.C.I5O0I
UJ
_ Hebraic Monotheism.
Zoroaster.
-
-^pHj
^^"Igean Cuhure.
B.C.IOOoI
_ Hellenic Culture.
-
g <
-
:
Z "^
-
_
< ^
' Thales.
B.C 000_
_ r.uddha. Confucius.
-
_ -Socrates.
_
° < .
. Plato. Aristotle.
-
. Stoics and Epicureans.
AD. I
0 W
-
-
0 00
. ChristiaiMty.
-
111 <
_
-
QC -i
. .\eo-platonists.
AD. 500 _
0 ^0
_St. .Augustine.
DARK
_ Mohammed.
ACES
Johannes Scotus.
AD 1000 J
_ Avicenna.
. Scholasticism
. .\nselm. .\belard.
-
f4^D\^VALci
-
SCHetASTIC Eftl
. Aquinas. R. Bacon.
. Wiclif.
AD.ISOOJ
"1
-Copernicus. Luther.
-
MOD£(-?NOR
. !■ lancis liacon. Newton.
-
SCIENTIFIC
. Kant. Steam.
ADlOOO_
ERA
_l>arwin. 1' leclricity
1
OUR OWN DAY COMPARED WITH THE
HISTORIC PAST
Our day, with its conceptions, beliefs, hopes, and endea-
vours, is but a tiny portion of the past ; for thousands of
years peoples have existed who have lived in other intel-
lectual spheres than ours, who have pursued other ideals.
186
welfare. In respect of material civilisa-
tion man passes through stages that
differ widely from one another, that vary
according to the manner in which the
necessities for existence are obtained,
and according to the way in which enemies
are withstood for the safeguarding of life,
welfare, and acquisitions already gained.
Races are spoken of as supporting them-
selves by the chase and fishing, or by cattle-
breeding and farming, according to
whether they are accustomed to derive
subsistence directly from " nature un-
adorned," or by means of the cultivation
and utilisation of natural products.
No sharp line of distinction, however,
may be drawn. It is inadmissible to
speak of races as supporting themselves
solely by hunting and fishing, for the
very same peoples feed on products of the
soil wherever they are found and recog-
nised as means of subsistence. They
live, it is true, upon flesh and fish, but also
upon roots and the fruit of wild trees.
While in this state of civilisation, man
avails himself only of that which Nature
places before him ; he neither adapts
Nature to his desire, to his needs, or to his
manner of living, nor understands how to
do it. He can make no further use of
Nature than to acquire a knowledge of the
sources of supply, of how to seize time and
opportunity, and to overcome the obstacles
of life in his own territory. He ascertains
the haunts of game, discovers how to
obtain fish, explores for wild honey or
edible roots, learns to climb the tallest
trees and to let himself down into the
deepest caves ; but he lacks the ability to
cultivate Nature, to cause her to produce
according to his will.
Gradually the one phase amalgamates
with the other. It is not seldom that
hunting tribes have small tracts of land
on which they raise a few edible plants.
Observation of Nature teaches them that
germs develop from fallen seeds, and
leads of itself to the idea that it is not best
to allow plants to grow up wild, and that
it would be expedient to clear the surround-
ing ground for their better growth. And
when this stage is reached, the next step —
not to allow seeds to spring up by chance,
but to place them in the soil one's self —
is not very far off ; and thus the mere
. acquisition of Nature's raw vegetable pro-
ducts gives place to agriculture. Often
enough we observe instances of the men of
a group carrying on hunting operations,
THE C lEAT Si
IN MAN'S DEVELOPMENT
ing of weapons and of contri-
vances used for the capture
of animals lay within the
province of the men.
The discovery of how to
produce fire by artificial
mean?, independently
effected in all parts of the
world — as was also the
discovery of the art of
navigation — was of the
greatest importance for
the entire future. Fire was
first a result of chance.
When lightning set a por-
tion of the forest in flames,
and caused a multitude of
while the women
are not only occu-
pied with their
domestic employ-
ments, but also till
the soil ; thus the
men are hunters
and fishers, and
the women are
agriculturists. Do-
mestic work led
the latter to take
up the cultivation
of plants, even as
it led them to the
other light femi-
nine handicrafts ;
while the repair-
animals or fruits to be
roasted, men put it to
practical use. They re-
cognised the advantage
that fire gave them and
sought to preserve it.
The retention of the fire
which had been sent
down from heaven be-
came one of the most
weighty and significant
of functions. Man
learned how to keep
wood - fibres smoulder-
ing, and how to blow
them into flame at will ;
he also learned that it
MANKINDS PROGRESS IN HABITS OF DRESS possible tO COUVeV
This series of typical pictures is intended roughly to illustrate the upward progress of "^ .i j. j.- r +
man from the almost nude savage to the neatly and conveniently dressed gentleman nrC, Or the pOtentiaJlty
ofto-day. The Elizabethan dandy is, of course, as fully dressed as man can be, and is r r alnnp- with
introduced only as indicating the great change of sartorial ideas in modern times. ^'- Uic, aii.;ii5 wini
1S7
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
him in his wanderings. But even then
success was uncertain until a hicky
chance led him to discover how to pro-
duce flames at will, by rubbing two
sticks together or by twirling one against
the other. These actions were originally
performed for other purposes — to bore
holes in a piece of wood, or to rub it into
fibres ; finally, one or the other was carried
out with such vigour that a filament began
to burn, and the discovery was made.
Sparks from flint must have suggested a
second method of kindling a fire ; certainly
the art of igniting soft filaments of wood
by means of a spark — thus enabling the
very smallest source of combustion to be
■ used for human purposes — was known to
man in the earliest times. The obvious
ESQUIMAU MAKING FIRE BY FRICTION
results of the use of fire are means of
obtaining warmth and of cooking food.
Self-defence had already led to the use
of weapons, and, at the same time, the
contrivances for hunting and fishing must
have become more and more perfect.
A very low degree of civilisation is
that of races unacquainted with the bow
and arrow, and familiar with club or
boomerang only — who know how to make
use merely of the weight of a substance,
or, as in the case of the boomerang, of a
peculiar means of imparting motion.
The time previous to the discovery of
the art of working in metal was the Age
of Stone. It was a natural transition
period during which men began to learn
to make use of the malleable metals, which
could be hammered and beaten into
various shapes, and finally discovered
i88
AN INGENIOUS INDIAN FIRE DRILL
how to work in iron. Iron, by being
placed in the fire, brought to a white
heat, and smelted, was rendered capable
of being put to such uses as were impos-
sible in the case of brittle materials —
bone or stone, for example. Many races
never acquired the art of working even in
the softer metals, and procured metallic
implements from other peoples. The
great importance of metal-working is
borne out by the fact that the position
of the smith, even in legendary times,
has been of the utmost significance. The
Ages of Stone and of Metal belong to the
most important stages of civilisation.
THE GAUCHO'S WAY OF GETTING
THE GREAT STEPS IN MAN'S DEVELOPMENT
Having made himself weapons, man did
not employ them in fights with animals
only ; he also used them on his fellow-men,
and at the same time arose the necessity
for protective coverings — that is, the need
for a means of neutralising the effect of
weapons on the body. Thus followed the
invention of the shield as a portable
shelter, of the coat of mail and of the
helmet, and of armour in general in all its
different forms and varieties.
Together with weapons, utensils are
characteristic of material culture. Utensils
are implements used in the arts of peace,
domestic and industrial ; they are instru-
ments which enable us to increase our
power over Nature. Some utensils have
undergone the same transformations as
have weapons ; others have their own
independent history. Just as the edges
of shells served as patterns for knife-
blades, so did hollow stones,
the shells of crustaceans or
„ _ rnderwood & Underwood
THE WONDERFUL ADVANCE IN AGRICULTURE
These pictures present a striking contrast : the sullen clod with his primitive
Mansell
THE MAN WITH THE HOE
From the painting by Millet
of tortoises, become models for
dishes and basins. From the
discovery of the impervious-
ness of dried earth, the
potter's art developed ; it be-
came possible to mould clay
into desired shapes while
moist, and then, when dry, to
employ it in its new form as a
vessel for holding liquids ; for
that which has always been
of the greatest importance in
the making of utensils has
been the taking advantage of
two opposite characteristics
displayed by a material dur-
ing the different stages of
its manufacture — plasticity,
which admits of its first being
moulded into various forms,
and another qualit}', which
causes it afterward to stiffen
into solidity and strength.
A further acqu sition was
the art of braiding and plait-
ing, the joining together of
flexible materials in such a
way that they held together
by force of friction alone.
Thus coherent, durable fabrics
may be produced, and by
joining together small parts
into an aggregate it is also
hoe, and the great Canadian reaper drawn by thirty horses, both in use to-day. pOSSible tO give a definite
189
The way in which man has protected him-
self against his foes in battle, and the
gradual progress and decline of such
methods, is shown in these pictures. The
first is from the monuments of Nineveh, and
shows the earliest form of chain mail. In
the second we see the armour of the Roman
legionary, while the third shows the heavy
accoutrement of a mediaeval warrior. A
helmet of the same period is also shown.
Growth of
the Textile
Arts
MAN'S METAL DRESS : THE DEVELOPMENT OF ARMOUR FROM AN'CIENT TO MEDIAEVAL TIMES
from injury the idea of sledges develops.
Things that are round enough are rolled
to their destinations ; this leads to the
invention of rollers and wheels, materials
of required form being brought into
combination with rudimentary agents of
circular motion, and thus, through a
rotary, a horizontal movement is obtained ;
and so the force of gravity is made use of,
consistency of motion procured, and the
hindering effect of friction overcome to
the greatest possible degree.
Means for carrying inanimate objects
once invented, it is not long before they
are put to use for the conveyance of man
himself ; thus methods for the trans-
portation of human beings are discovered
in the same manner as the means for the
carriage of goods.
In primitive times transportation by
water is employed to a far greater extent
than by land. Man learns how to swim
in the same way as other animals do, by
discovering how to repress his struggles,
transforming them into definite, regular
movements. The sight of
objects afloat must, through un-
con.scious analysis — experience
— have taught men to make
water-tight structures for the
conveyance of goods upon water, and,
later, for the use of man himself. The pole
by which the first raft was pushed along
developed into the rudder. Kayaks and
canoes were built of wood, of bark, and
form to the whole and to adapt it to
various uses. The quality of adaptability
is especially developed in the products of
plaiting, but the quality of imperviousness
is lacking. Wickerwork was used not only
in the form of baskets, but also in other
shapes, as means for protection
and .shelter, as material for
sails, as well as for tying and
binding. The art of weaving
arises from plaiting, and along with it come
methods for spinning thread. It thus
becomes possible to make an immense
number of different useful articles out of
shapeless vegetable material. Fibres are
rendered more durable by being bound
together, and textures formed from
threads are adapted to the most various
uses of life. This has an influence on the
development of weapons also : bow-
strings, slings, and lassos presuppose a
rudimentary knowledge, at least, of the
textile arts ; and as knowledge increases,
so are the products improved in turn.
Means for conveyance arc also invented,
that difficulties arising from distance may
be overcome. At first men carry burdens
upon their backs, heads, or shoulders, or
in the hand, placing whatever they wish
to transport in a utensil — a basket or a
piece of cloth — thus producing a coherent
whole ; later, in order to render convey-
ance still more convenient, handles are
invented. Objects are dragged along the
ground, and from an effort to save them
I go
Man's
First
Boats
light.
The invention of gunpowder and fire-
arms rendered the protection of armour
useless, and by the sixteenth century it
had been greatly modified. The first of
these pictures shows the slight armour
worn by James II. The second is a suit
of Japanese armour, discarded in our
own time ; while the last is a portrait
of a present day Life-guardsman, whose
cuirass is more ornamental than useful.
MAN'S METAL DRESS: THE GRADUAL MODIFICATION OF ARMOUR IN MODERN TIMES
of hides. In this connection, moreover,
an epoch-marking invention was that of
cloths in which to catch the wind — sails ;
and this, too, was a result of observation
and experience. Man had known the
effect of the wind upon fluttering cloth,
to his loss, long enough before he hit
upon the idea of employing it to his
advantage. Finally he learned that by
adjusting the sails he might make use of
winds blowing from any direction.
Habitations are structures built in order
to facilitate and assure the existence of
man and the preservation of his goods.
Indeed, the presence of caverns caused
men to recognise the protective virtue of
roof and wall, and the knowledge thus
acquired gave rise in turn to the making
of artificial caves. Holes beneath over-
hanging banks and precipices led to the
building of houses with roofs extending
beyond the rambling walls. Perhaps the
protection afforded by leafy roofs, and
the walls formed by the trunks of trees in
primeval forests, may also have turned
men's thoughts to the con-
struction of dwellings. Houses
of various forms were built, cir-
cular and rectangular ; some
with store-rooms and hearths. The use
of dwellings presupposes a certain amount
of consistency in the mode of living, the
presence of local ties, and a general spirit
favouring fixed and permanent residence.
Home
and
Dress
Man's
First
Houses
Nomadic races use movable or temporary
shelters only — waggons, tents, or huts.
The houses of stationary peoples become
more and more firm and stable. At first
they are built of earth and wickerwork,
later of stone, and finally of bricks, as
among the Babylonians. Foun-
dations are invented, dwellings
are accurately designed as to
line and angle ; the curved line
is introduced, bringing with it arches
both round and pointed, as may be seen
in the remains of Roman and Etruscan
buildings. The structure is adorned, and
it becomes a work of art.
But man also dwelt over the water,
sometimes erecting his habitations upon
rafts and floats, often upon structures
that rose from beneath the surface.
Thus was he, dwelling in communities of
various sizes, secure from the attacks of
land enemies. Even to-day there are
uncivilised peoples who live over water,
constructing their homes upon piles.
Clothing, however, was invented partly
that in cold climates men might survive
the winter, partly for the sake of ornament.
In tropical regions man originally had no
knowledge of the necessity for clothing :
garments are masks, disguises ; they bear
with them a charm ; they are the peculiar
property of the medicine-men or of those
who in the religious dance invoke the
higher powers. Modesty is a derived
IQI
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Taming
of the
Wild
feeling ; it cannot exist until a high state
of individualisation has been attained,
until each man desires exclusive possession
of his wife, and therefore wishes to shield
her from the covetousness of other men.
With the knowledge of dress, a desire
for adornment, the effort to
assist Nature in producing cer-
tain definite aesthetic effects,
arises. Less uniformity in the
appearance of the body is wanted, and
this brings tattooing and the use of orna-
ment into vogue. Later there is a fusing
of these several aims ; clothing becomes
protection, veil, and ornament in one, ful-
filling all three functions at the same time.
Another epoch-marking discovery, often
arrived at while races are still in the
state of subsistence by hunting, is the
domestication of animals. This may have
originated in the practice of provoking
one beast to attack another in order to
vanquish them both the more easily.
Further development, bringing with it the
idea of totemism and the notion that the
soul of an animal dwells in man, drew
him nearer to his animal neighbours ;
and he sought them out as comrades and
attendants. The taming of
wild creatures arose from two
sources — human egoism, and
the innate feeling of unity and
identification with Nature
common to all savages ; hence
on the one hand, the subjuga-
tion of animals, and, on the
other, their domestication.
Neither employment rendered
it by any means less possible
for men to hold animals in
reverence, or to attribute to
them virtue as ancestral spirits.
Such acquisitions of exter-
nal culture accompany man
during the transition from his
subsistence by the pure pro-
ducts of Nature to the culti-
vation of natural resources,
cattle-breeding and agriculture
— occupations necessitating
the greatest unrest and mo-
bility. The simple life in
Nature incites men to wander
forth that they may discover
land adapted for their sup-
port ; they rove about in
search of roots as well as of
living prey. The breeding of
domestic animals also causes
192
them to travel in the hope of finding
ground for pasture ; nor does agriculture
in its primitive form tend to establish
permanence of residence, although it
contains within itself latent possibilities
of developing a settled life, one of the
most important factors in the progress of
mankind.
Only fixed, domestic peoples are able to
create great and lasting institutions, to
store up the results of civilisation for
distant later races, and to establish a
developed, well-organised commercial and
civil life. The transition from nomadism
to life in permanent residences has,
therefore, been one of the greatest steps
in the development of humanity. At the
time of the beginnings of agriculture, how-
ever, man was still a periodic
wanderer. According to the
field-grass system of cultiva-
tion, seed is sown in hastily-
cleared ground, which soon becomes
exhausted and is then abandoned. A
migration follows and new land is cleared.
This system continues until men learn to
cultivate part of the land in a district,
allowing the remainder to lie fallow for
Mankind
" Settling
Down "
PRIMITIVE DWELLINGS OF TO-DAY: HOUSE-BOATS
AT CANTON
Not only are there lake-dwellers to-day, as we have seen, but
even large communities, as at Canton, in China, live in boats,
Mr"
Ki\
1 1
THE BEGINNINGS OF COMMERCE: PRIMITIVE PEOPLE BARTERING IVORY TUSKS
AND BULL-HIDES
THE GREAT STEPS IN MAN'S DEVELOPMENT
a time in order that the soil may recover ;
thus they remain fixed in their chosen
district. Various circumstances — for ex-
ample, the danger of enemies from without,
and the difficulties attending migration —
must have led to this change, the transition
to the system of alternation of crops.
The wanderings are confined to less ex-
tensive regions, the same fields are
returned to after a few years, until finally
tJie relation of patches under culti-
vation to fallow land is reduced to a
system, and the time of wandering is past.
With fixed residence the forms of
communities alter. The group settles in
a certain district, homes are built close
to one another, and the patriarchal
organisation gives place to the village,
which, with its definite boundaries, is
thenceforth the nucleus of the social
aggregate. Often several village com-
munities have fields and forests in com-
mon, and a common ownership of dams
and canals ; Nature takes care that
they do not become isolated, but unite
together in close contact for common
defence and protection. With agricul-
ture is associated the working
up of raw products. These
are fashioned into materials
for the support of life and for
enjoyment ; furniture for dwellings,
clothing, tools, utensils, and weapons
are made. For, however much agricul-
ture favours a life of peace, so rarely
does man live in friendship with his
fellows that agricultural peoples also find
it necessary to arm themselves for war.
At first manufacture is not separated
from farming ; the agriculturist himself
prepares the natural products, assisted by
the members of his family. Later, it is
easily seen that some individuals are
more skilled than others ; it is also recog-
nised that skill may be developed by
practice and that employments must be
learned. Therefore it is requisite that
special individuals of the community
should prepare themselves for particular
activities in the working up of raw pro-
ducts and pursue these activities in con-
sistency with the needs of the society —
trade or craft. The craftsman at first
labours for the community ; in every
village the tailor, cobbler, smith, barber,
and schoolmaster is supported by society
at large. The craftsman receives his
appointed income — that is, his portion
of the common supply of food ; and, in
'3
The coming
of the
Craftsman
addition, every one for whom he expends
his labour gives him something in compen-
sation, or finds him food while employed
about his house, until, finally, a syste-
matic method of exchange is established ;
and with this another advance— an
epoch for civilisation — is arrived at.
This is the division of labour. It is
found advantageous not only that the
_ p. craftsman be employed as
, f "^^ he is needed, but also that he
Labour , i r i ,
Pr bl produce a supply of products
peculiar to his trade ; for
the times of labour do not in the least
harmonise with the times of demand.
Although during the first periods of in-
dustrial life men sought more or less to
adjust these factors, in later times they
become wholly separate from one another.
There is always, in addition, labour ready
to be expended on casual needs ; in more
advanced phases of civilisation this con-
dition of affairs is not avoided ; but
wherever labour can be disassociated
from fortuitous necessity, the capacity
for production is greatly increased. Com-
modities are manufactured during the
best seasons for production and are
preserved until the times of need ; thus
men become independent of the moment.
Here also, as in other problems of
civilisation, it is necessary to surmount
the incongruities of chance, and to ren-
der all circumstances serviceable to our
purposes.
Exchange and division of labour are
the great factors of the progress of a
civilisation based upon industrialism.
Crafts and trades develop and improve ;
greater and greater skill is demanded,
and consequently the time of preparation
necessary for the master craftsman be-
comes longer and longer. The worker
limits himself to a definite sphere of
production and carries his trade forward
to a certain perfection. His wares will
then be more eagerly sought for than
those made by another hand ;
-, they are better, yet cheaper,
r» , . for his labour is lightened by
Developing , • , , .,, f^ . . -^
his greater skill. His various
fellow craftsmen, and the agriculturist
also, must exchange their goods for his ;
for the more specialised the work of an
individual, the more necessary the com-
munity is to him, in order that he may
satisfy all his various requirements. Ex-
change is at first natural ; that is,
commodities are traded outright, each
193
THE BEARERS OF MANS BURDENS: PRIMITIVE AND NATURAL METHODS OF CARRYING
These illustrations show a palanquin borne by horses ; the Chinese single-wheel cart and the same
assisted by a donkey and a sail ; pack mules and camels ; and a sledge drawn by Esquimau dogs,
194
SOME METHODS OF CONVEYANCE
VARIOUS
AND COUNTRIES
In this plate are illustrated a caravan of yaks ; the elephant with a howdah ; the African litter ; reindeers as pack
animals ; and the familiar bullock waggon of France — a few of the many methods of carrying used by man.
195
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
individual giving goods directly in return
for the goods he receives. The production
of the community as a whole has become
far richer, far more perfect. The labour
of the organised society produces more
than the activity of separate individuals.
Here, again, is shown the impulse of
man to free himself from the exigencies
of the moment, to lift himself above the
fortuitous differences that arise between
Mediums of exchange, particularly
necessary for the carrying on of traffic
between different communities, which exist
in large quantities and can be divided up
into parts, make their appearance in very
early times. At first their values are more
or less empirical, dependent upon the con-
ditions of individual cases, until gradu-
ally a medium obtains general recognition
and thus becomes money. The same need
for surmounting the lack of
uniformity in individual
requirements has led the
most different peoples in
the world to the inven-
tion of money. Naturally,
many different things have
been employed as mediums
of exchange ; these vary
according to geographical
situations, conditions of
civilisation, and the cus-
toms of races. Pastoral
tribes at first employed
cattle ; but tobacco, cow-
ries, strings of flat shells,
bits of mother - of - pearl,
rings, and hides are also
used. At last it is found
that metal is stable, dur-
able, divisible, and of
generally recognised value ;
and finally the precious
metals take precedence of
all others. Finally this
form of money is adopted
by all civilised races.
Division of labour origin-
ates in the development
of the handicrafts, in the
distinction made between
the labour of working up
the raw material and that
(^f its production. With
the help of a currency it
PRIMITIVE MONEY: SELLING A SLAVE FOR COWRIES
Cowries, which are small shells, are a very primitive form of money, still used in leads tO a Complete traUS-
parts of Africa and in Siam. They were formerly so used in India, where -150,000 f^,-„,of i^ri nnt r>nl\7 ni
worth used to be imported annually. In Africa 5,000 shells are equivalent to Si. lOinidllOIl, IIOL Oiuy Ol
economic relations, but
supply and demand. The more varied
the production, the more difficult it be-
comes to find men who are able to offer
the required commodity in exchange for
what has been brought to them. An
escape from this embarrassment lies in
the discovery of a universal measure of
exchange value and medium of exchange
— money. Money is the means of adjust-
ment which renders traffic between men
independent of individual requirements.
196
also of the social conditions of men.
Country becomes city ; centres of popu-
lation which rest upon an industrial
basis arise ; in many cases growth of the
various manufacturing industries is fur-
thered by unfavourable agricultural con-
ditions. Such industrial centres require
markets and market-places ; it is neces-
sary for the producers of raw materials to
come to market from the country with
their goods, in order that they may meet
Early Roman bar money of the 4th century B C.
THE BEGINNING OF MONEY: SOME OF THE EARLIEST KNOWN COINS IN EXISTENCE
Ofthese coins, chiefly from the British Museum, the South England iron currency bars are perhaps most interesting:.
Our reproduction of these is one-tenth actual size. It will be noticed that the handles and the sues vary.
THE BEGINNING OF PRINTING: STRADANUS'S PRINTING OFFICE AT ANTWERP IN THE YEAR 1600
From a very rare engraving in the British Museum
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING: THE LARGEST PRESS IN THE WORLD
How great has been the progress in the art oi printing is seen from these two pictures. The modern Hoe print-
ing press is a marvel 01' mechanism. The first editions of this History were printed on a similar machine.
198
THE GREAT STEPS IN MAN'S DEVELOPMENT
together with the craftsmen of the city, and
with other producers from the country who
offer their wares in turn. The market
town is the point of departure for further
culture. Here, too, the endeavour to
harmonise individual incongruities exists.
Fruit is sent to market ; each man has his
choice ; an exchange value is determined
by means of .comparison,
Y ^ ^ through analysis of the indi-
J^. vidual prices which themselves
do not furnish any rational
determination of worth, and therefore
expose both buyer and seller to chance.
Thus a market-price develops. The city is
the living agency promoting industry and
exchange ; it brings its population into con-
tact with the population of the country by
means of the market, and prevents men
from separating into isolated, unsym-
pathetic, or even hostile groups.
Here industry flourishes — arts, crafts,
and large manufactures. In the latter,
division of labour is developed to a maxi-
mum degree, and production in factories
derives a further impulse through the
introduction of machinery. Machines, in
contrast to implements and utensils, are
inanimate but organised instruments for
labour, requiring subordinate human
activity only (attendance) so that they
may impart force and motion in a manner
corresponding with the designs of the
inventor. Machinery is originally of simple
form, dependent on water or wind for
motive power — rude mills, and contriv-
ances for the guiding of water in canals or
conduits belong to its primitive varieties.
But man's power of invention increases,
and in the higher stage of industrial evolu-
tion the facilities for labour are enor-
mous. We have but to think of steam and
of electricity with all their tremendous
developments of power. Finally the dis-
covery of the unity of force leads men to
look upon Nature as a storehouse of energy
and to devise means by which natural
_, ,, forces may be guided, one
The Use r e i J • i
f M ( form of energy converted mto
P _ another and transferred from
place to place ; and thus man
becomes almost all-powerful. He is not
able to create, it is true, but he
may at least mould and shape to his
desire that which Nature has already
formed. Thus the discovery how to
direct the forces of Nature enables
us again, according to the principle
already cited, to escape the disabilities of
human differentiation with its attendant
incongruities.
As already stated, division of labour
leads to exchange ; exchange leads to com-
merce. Commerce is exchange on a large
scale, organised into a system with special
regard to the production of a store, or
supply. The latter requires a certain
knowledge of trade ; the centres of demand
must be sought out, and the goods trans-
ported to these centres. In this way a
fruitful reciprocal action develops ; and
as production influences trade, so may
trade influence production, governing it
according to the fluctuations of demand,
and leading to the creation of stores of
commodities for which a future market
is to be expected. Thus commerce pre-
supposes special knowledge and special
skill ; it develops a special technique
through which it is enabled to execute its
complicated tasks. Men who live by
trade become distinct from craftsmen ;
and the mercantile class results. Mer-
chants are men whose task is to effect an
organised exchange of natural and manu-
factured products. Commerce always
displays an impulse to extend
Boundless -^^^j^ beyond the borders of
Growth of • 1 "i ■ , ,
^ smgle nations — not to remam
Commerce • i j i u - j. u
mland only, but to become a
foreign trade also ; for the products of
foreign countries and climates, however
valuable they may be, would be inacces-
sible except for commerce. Thus trade
becomes both import and export. The
first step is for the tradesman or his repre-
sentative to travel about peddling goods,
or for an owner of wares or money to offer
capital to an itinerant merchant with the
object that the latter may divide the
profits with him later on. This leads to
the sending of merchandise to a middle-
man, who places it on the market in a
distant region — commission business. The
establishment of a branch or agency in a
foreign country, in order to trade there
while in immediate connection with the
main business house, follows ; and, finally,
merchants deal directly with foreign houses
without the intervention of middlemen,
thus entering into direct export trade.
This, of course, presupposes a great
familiarity with foreign affairs and con-
fidence in their soundness ; consequently
it is possible only in a highly developed
state of civilisation.
Foreign trade is carried on overland by
means of caravans, and, in later, times,
199
aoo
THE GREAT STEPS IN MAN'S DEVELOPMENT
by railways ; over sea, through a merchant
marine^saihng vessels and steamships.
The magnitude of commerce, its peculiar
methods, and its manifold, varying phases
combine to produce new and surprising
phenomena : traffic by sea leads to insur-
ance and to different forms of commercial
associations ; intercourse by caravan gives
rise to the construction of halt-
ing-stations, establishments for
Birth of New
Trades and
Institutions
refreshment and repair, that
finally develop into taverns
and inns. And that which first arose from
necessity is subsequently turned to use for
other purposes : insurance is one of the
most fruitful ideas of the present day ;
hotels are an absolute necessity.
Commerce is able to bring further con-
trivances and institutions into being, here,
again, overcoming individual incongruity
by means of combination. Trade cannot
always be carried on directly between the
places of production and of consumption ;
one district requires more, another less ;
it would be difficult to supply all from
one centre of distribution. Thus an
intermediate carrying trade is developed,
rendering the surmounting of obstacles less
difficult and increasing the stability of the
market. The demands of the middleman
are compensated for by these advantages.
Thus the world's commerce develops, and
that which is accomplished by market
traffic in lesser districts is brought about
by the concentrative influence of bourses,
or exchanges, in the broadest spheres.
Here, as in the smaller markets, the ten-
dency is for all prices to seek a level, to
become as independent as possible of
individual conditions ; and so commerce
between nations, and the possibility of
ordering goods from the most distant
lands, bring with them an adjustment :
world prices are formed ; and to establish
these is the business of the exchanges.
The exchange is a meeting together of
merchants for the trans-
action of business by pur-
chase or sale. It has
acquired still more the
character of a world' institution since men
have been able to interchange advices by
means of telegraph and telephone ; it is
possible for the bourses of different countries
to transact business with one another from
moment to moment, so that the ruling prices
of the world can be immediately known.
It has already been stated that com-
merce leads to a taking up of residence in
Commerce
Brings the
World Together
Supply
of Human
Labour
foreign countries ; it also leads to colonisa-
tion, and it is chiefly due to commerce that
civilisation is introduced into foreign lands.
In earlier centuries the labour question
was settled by means of the legal sub-
jection of certain classes of men, until com-
plete in justice was reached in slavery. The
system was rendered still more efficient
by making slave-ownership hereditary.
Slavery originated in wars and man-
hunting, in times when there were but
few domesticated animals and no ma-
chines, when utensils were very imperfect
and a more or less developed mode of life
could only be conducted by means of the
manual labour of individuals. Therefore,
in order to obtain labourers, men resorted
to force, introducing a slave population of
which the individuals were either divided
among households or kept in special slave
habitations. The industry of the slave
was often increased by the promise of
definite privileges or private possessions.
He was often granted a home and family
life, and thus he became a bondman —
burdened and taxed and bound
to the soil, it is true, but other-
wise looked upon as a man
possessed of ordinary rights
and privileges. Even during the days of
slavery there were instances of emancipa-
tion, and the possibility was opened up of
rising to the social position of a slave-owner.
The evolution of a free working class,
with recompense for labour, is one of the
most important chapters in the history of
modern civilisation. The chief sphere of
development is that of the crafts and
trades. The power of guilds often induces
legislation in their favour ; thus they
become monopolies, and only such indi-
viduals as are members of an association
may adopt its particular trade or craft
as a profession. Sometimes the unity
of a guild is broken, and the individual
right to form judgments enters in place
of the rules laid down by the corporation.
From this results competition, which
finally leads up to free competition.
Through free competition, the encumbering
rigidity of the guilds is avoided ; it leads
to a high development of the individual,
and is therefore a great source of progress ;
it discloses the secrets of the craft, freeing
men from deeply-rooted prejudices in
regard to different vocations ; and it in-
creases man's inventive capacity, producing
new methods for carrying on trades and
new combinations and connections.
201
202
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STEPS IN
MAN'S
DEVELOPMENT
II
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Professor
JOSEPH
KOHLER
WMMMM\-IMMHMMMM>-lMMt-IMI-IMV-<MM>-IMWV-<,-IMMMV-l)-A^<Ml?
THE HIGHER PROGRESS OF MANKIND
CPIRITUAL culture may develop in the
*^ directions of knowing and of feeling.
These two forms of the manifestation of
consciousness are originally not to be
separated from each other ; but as time
goes on, a preponderance of one or the
other becomes noticeable. Language is
the first result of spiritual culture : the
communication of thoughts by means of
words (sound pictures of ideas). Language
arises from the necessities of life, from
the need for communication among the
members of a social aggregate.
A much later acquisition, the art of
writing, or the fixation of language in a
definite, permanent form, stands in close
connection with speech. Writing develops
according to two systems : the one based
on the symbollising or picturing of ideas —
picture-writing, hieroglyphics ; and the
other on the breaking up of the speech-
sounds of a language into a notation of
syllables or letters — syllabic or letter writ-
ing. According to the first method thoughts
are directly pictured ; according to the
second, sounds, not
ideas, are represented
by symbols — that
is, the sounds which
stand for the ideas
are transformed into
signs. The transition
from sign to syllabic
writing comes about
in this manner : if,
during its develop-
ment, a language uses
the same sovmd to
express various con-
ceptions, men repre-
sent this sound by one
sign ; and whenever
a foreign word is
reproduced in writing;
it is first separated
into syllables, and
the syllables are then
pictured by the same
signs as are employed
to represent similar
sounds — but different
GUTENBERG, THE INVENTOR OF PRINTING
Nothing has eclipsed the printing: press as an agency
of man's intellectual and spiritual advancement.
ideas — in the native speech. Thus sym-
bols are employed more and more phoneti-
cally, and less and less meaning comes to
be attached to them. This process must
continue its development if the pronuncia-
tion changes as lime goes on ; the old
writing, with its national symbol-method,
may be retained ; but with the changing
of speech-sounds the new writing is altered ;
s^dlables are now represented by signs,
and combinations of syllables are repro-
duced by means of a combination of their
corresponding symbols. Thus phonetic
writing was not an invention, but a gradual
development. Together with the phonetic
symbols, ideograms or hieroglyphs also
exist, as in Babylonian. It is especially
interesting, and indicative of the unity of
the human mind, that the transition to
syllabic writing has been arrived at inde-
pendently by different races ; the Aztecs,
for example, exhibit a wholly independent
development.
Communication by writing ma}' be
either single or private, or general and
pubhc ; in the latter
case plurality is at-
tained through such
methods as the
affixing of bills and
placards, or by means
of transcripts or re-
productions of the
original copy. At
first the latter are
made in accordance
with the ordinary
methods of writing ;
and in slave-holding
communities — Rome,
for example — slaves
who wrote to dicta-
tion were employed
as scribes. The dis-
covery of a method
by which to obtain
a plurality of copies
through a single
mechanical process
was epoch-making.
The printing-press
203
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
has performed a
far greater service
to humanity than
have most inven-
tions ; for, with the
possibihty of pro-
ducing thousands
of copies of a com-
munication, thr
thoughts em-
bodied in it be-
come forces ; they
may enter the
minds of many
individuals who
are either con-
vinced or actualh
guided by tliem.
Ideas beconn
active through
their suggestion
on the masses ol
the population .
This may lead to
a one-sided ruli'
of p.ublic opinion :
but a healthy race
will travel intel- examples of aztec hieroglyphic sculpture and writing
lectually in many The hieroglyphics and script of the Aztecs were independently developed. The first illustration
f'lirp>r^+ir»nc a n ~r\ '^ from a sculpture in Mexico, and the other is a small reproduction of a page of the Maya
(UreCTlOnS, a n O manuscript at Dresden. In both cases the symbolism is only imperfectly understood at present.
various beliefs
The
Spreading
of Ideas
supplement one another, struggle together,
conquer, and are conquered. In this
manner thoughts awaken popular move-
ments, rousing a people to a
hitherto unknown degree, and
forcing men to think and to
join issues. Thus the Press be-
comes a factor in civilisation of the ver^^
first importance. The necessity for periodic
communication, together with curiosity
that refuses to wait long for information,
leads to the establishment of regularly
recurrent publications ; and thus, in
addition to the book-press, the newspaper-
press, that has learned how to hold great
centres of population under its control,
appears. Naturally this method of aiding
the progress of civilisation has its dis-
advantages, as have all other methods ;
the conception of the world becomes
superficial ; individuality loses in charac-
ter ; not only a certain levelling of educa-
tion, but also a levelling of views of life
and ot modes of thought, results. But, on
the whole, knowledge is sj^read abroad as
it never was before.
Man, as a thinking being, craves for a
conception of life ; and in his inmost
204
thoughts he seeks for an explanation of the
double relationship of I\Ian to Nature and
of Nature to Man, striving to bring all into
harmony. This he finds in religion.
Religion is belief in God ; that is,
belief in spiritual forces inseparable from
and interwoven through the universe —
forces that render all things distinct
and separate, yet make all coalescent
and firm, permeating all, and giving to
every object its individuality. Man is
impelled by Nature to conceive of the
universe as divine. This idea exhibits
itself universally among primitive folk
in the form of animism — a belief that
the entire internal and external world is
animated, filled with supernatural beings
that have originally no determinate nature,
but which may appear in the
most \aried of forms, may
vanish and may create them-
selves anew, as clouds arise
from unseen vapour in the air. Spirits
are supposed to be not far removed from
man ; families as well as individuals
consider themselves to stand more or
less in connection with them ; and men,
too, have a share in the invisible world
Man's
Craving for
Religion
THE HIGHER PROGRESS OF MANKIND
Beginnings
of Nature
Worship
when they have cast aside the garment
of the body in dream or in death. Thus,
every man is thought to have his pro-
tecting spirit, his manitou, that reveals
itself to him through signs and dreams.
Special incarnations, objects in which
supernatural beings are in-
herent or with which they are
in some way connected, are
called " fetiches " ; hence arises
fetichism, in regard to which the strangest
ideas were held in previous centuries
when the science of anthropology was
unknown. Trees, rocks, rivers, bits of
wood, images of one's own making— any
of these are thought capable of containing
beings of divine nature. Naturally, the
tree or the fragment of wood or of stone
is not worshipped, as men formerly
thought, but the spirit that is believed to
The Realm
of
Shadows
THE GREAT BUDDHA AT KAMAKURA, IN JAPAN
Professor Kohler points out that in the history of the world's religions,
although the belief in the omnipotence of God has become so wide-
spread, It is not thought inconsistent that a Buddha, claiming- to
incarnate the Supreme Being completely within himself, should appear.
have entered it. In many cases the belief
approaches worship of Nature, especially
among agricultural peoples. Divinity is
recognised in the shape of factors essential
to agriculture — sun, sky, lightning,
thunder ; these being the beneficent
deities^ in contrast to whom are the
earth-spirits who bring pestilences,
earthquakes, and other evils to man-
kind. Thus the cult is refined ; spirits are
no longer attached to fetiches, but men
worship the heavens, and the earth also.
Religion accompanies man from birth
to death. Spirits both for good
and for evil are supposed to
hover about him at his very
birth. The soul of some being —
perhaps an animal, perhaps an ancestor —
enters into the new-born child, and from
this spirit he receives his name.
Oftentimes there is a new con-
secration at the time of marriage;
often when an heir-apparent suc-
ceeds to the chieftainship. At his
decease primitive folk believe that
man enters the realm of shadows.
At first he hovers over the sea or
river of death, and often only
after having passed through many
hardships does he arrive in the
new kingdom, where he either
continues to live after the manner
of his former existence, or, accord-
ing to whether his life on earth
has been good or evil, inhabits a
higher or a lower supernatural
sphere. To the dead are conse-
crated their personal possessions —
horses, slaves, wives even — that
they ma}^ make use of them during
the new existence ; men go head-
hunting in order to send them
new helpmates. On the other
hand great care is often taken
that the spirits of the departed,
satisfied with their new existence,
may no longer molest the world of
the living : propitiative offerings
are made ; men avoid mentioning
the name of the departed, that
he may not be tempted to visit
them with his presence ; they seek
to make themselves unrecognisable
during the time immediately fol-
lowing his death, wear different
clothes, and adopt other dwelling-
places. Sometimes the light placed
near the deceased for the purpose
of guiding him back to his old
205
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
home is moved further and further away,
so that his ghost, unable to find the right
path, shah never return.
Thus the behef in spirits encompasses
primitive man, foUovving him step by step.
From animism develops worship of
heroes and polytheism, with their atten-
dant mythological narrations. The idea
of the unity of the supernatural world
becomes lost ; and the indefinite forms
of spirit become separate, independent
beings, that are developed more and
more in the direction of the souls either
of animals or of men. This splitting up
of the deity, which destroys the tendency
toward unity in religion, is followed by
a reaction that comes about
partly through a belief in crea-
The Belief
Many Gods
tion by a father of the gods,
partly through acceptance of
a historical origin of the mythological
world from a single source (theogonic
myths), and partly through direct
banishment of the plurality of gods and
a new formation of the belief in a unity
according either to theistic or to pan-
theistic ideas. In spite of the conception
of a world permeated and pervaded by
God alone, the belief that certain persons
and places are more powerful in respect
to the divinity than others is retained ;
and the appearance from time to • time
„ . of a Buddha who incarnates
Happiness j ■ c j^ j_i o
. . and mamtests the Supreme
. „ ,. . Being directly and completelv
m Religion ..,P ,. -l. ^ . ",
withm himselt — m a special
manner apart from other natural phe-
nomena— is also not looked upon as
inconsistent.
Religion is a thing of the emotions, not
merely in the sense of having its origin
in fear, or in the remembrance of lasting
sensations derived from visions or dreams,
but emotional in so far that it satisfies
the necessity felt by men for a consistent
life-conception — not an intellectual but
an emotional conception. It is not the
matter-of-fact desire for knowledge that
finds its expression in religion, but the joy
of the heart in a supreme power, the call
for help of the needy, and the conscious-
ness of our own insignificance and our
A STRANGE RELIGIOUS RITE: FUNERAL SACRIFICE OF THE TODAS IN SOUTHERN INDIA
The elaborate and extraordinary funeral rites of the Todas illustrate admirably the older notions of life and death.
A funeral endures for several days ; the body is cremated ; last of all the buffaloes of the deceased are slaughtered at
the grave and thought to enter into mystic reunion with their master. In olden timeS a whole troop would be
slaughtered, but under British influence the number has been limited to one for a common person and two for a chief.
206
NOAHS SACRIFICE
From the painting by Daniel Maclise, R.A.
mortality. Judgment is not yet
abstracted from the other psychic func-
tions ; indeed, it really retires behind
the emotions.
When men thus believe in divinity, if
the belief have an active influence on the
emotions, it follows that the individual
must establish some connection between
himself and the object of his worship.
This is brought about through certain
actions, or through the creation of cir-
cumstances in which special conditions
of consecration are perceived, and there-
with the possibility of a close relationship
with the Supreme Being. The acts
through which this relationship may be
brought about, taken collec-
„ ^. , tively, are embraced in the word
Basis of », -^ 1 • ,, J r r j
,„ .. worship, and if performed
Worship J • i. i ■ i. A
according to a strict system
they are called " rites." Sacrifice has an
important place among the ceremonies
observed in accordance with ritual. It
is based on a conception of the wants and
necessities of the higher beings, and, in
later times, is refined into a representation
of man's ethical feelings — unselfishness
and gratitude, which give pleasure to the
Deity and thus contribute to its happiness.
But sacrifice does not retain its unselfish
character for any great length of time.
Man thinks of himself first : he makes
fk z-' k offerings to the good spirits, but
of the ^"^ more particularly to the evil
n • ^1. , gods, in order to pacify their
Priesthood y J ii • -1
fury and appease their evil
desires. Sacrifices are also offered to the
dead, and from such offerings and
memorials is developed the idea of a
" family " or " clan," which outlives the
individual.
Thus, emotion is the principal active
agent ; but intellectual power also must
gradually lay its hold on the system of
belief. The principles discovered are
formulated into a science ; and the culti-
vation of this science becomes the special
duty of the priesthood, often as a secret
art^esoteric system — in which conceal-
ment is conducive to the maintenance of
the exclusiveness and peculiar power of
the priest class. The science becomes
207
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
partly mythologic-historical, partly dog-
matic, and partly ritualistic.
The artistic instinct develops partly in
connection with worship, partly in the
direction of its practical application to
life ; and although no very sharp line
of distinction is drawn between the two
tendencies, the germ at least of the
_ difference between the fine
_". . and the industrial arts is
c igjon ^j_^^^^ .^ existence from the
very earliest times. Worship
gives rise to images and pictures, at
first of the very roughest form. They
are not mere symbols ; they are the
garments or habitations with which the
spirit invests itself. The spirit may take
up its abode anyw^here according to the
different beliefs of man — in a plant, an
animal, a stone, above all, in a picture
or effigy that symbolically reflects its
peculiarities. Therefore, the ghosts of
ancestors are embodied in ancestral images.
Just as skulls were reverenced in earlier
times, in later days the images of the dead
[konvar) are worshipped. Such images
are the oldest examples of the art of
portraiture ; and the oldest dolls are the
rude puppets which according to the rites
of many races — the American Indians,
for example — widows must wear about
them as tokens, or as the husks or wrappers
of their husbands' doubles.
Religion itself becomes poetry. The
belief in the identity of spirits of the
dei)arted with animals, and the myths of
metamorphosis, take the form of fables
and fairy tales ; the cosmogonic and
theogonjc conceptions develop into my-
thologies ; hero sagas become epics ; the
myths of life in Nature become a glorifi-
cation of the external world, an expression
of unity with Nature, and thus a form of
lyric poetry.
Everyday life, too, demands artistic
expression. At first the childish passion
for the changing pictures that correspond
. ,. ^. with different ideas of the
Artistic • ,• -,, ,,
r . imagmation oms with the
Expression i • , • ,, ,
J , .J desire to impress others, and
finery in dress and ornamenta-
tion result. This has developed in every
clime. Tattooing arises not only from a
religious motive, but also from the desire
for ornament. The painting of men's
bodies, the often grotesque ideas, such as
artificial deformation of the head, knocking
out and blackening of teeth, ear ornaments
and mutilation of ears, pegs thrust through
208
the lips, and various methods of dressing
the hair, may be in part connected with
religious conceptions, for here the most
varied of motives co-operate to the same
end. Yet, on the other hand, there is no
doubt that they are also the outcome of
a craving for variation in form and in
colour. In the same way the darice is
not only an act of worship ; it is also a
means of giving vent to latent animal
spirits : thus, dances are often expressions
of the tempestuous sensual instincts of a
people.
The dance exhibits a special tendency
to represent the ordinary affairs of life
in a symbolic manner ; thus there are war
and hunting dances, and especially animal
dances in which each of the participants
believes himself to be permeated by the
spirit of some animal which throughout
the dance he endeavours to mimic. In
this way dramatic representation, which is
certainly based on the idea of personifica-
tion, on the notion that a man for the
time being may be possessed by the
spirit of some other creature that speaks
and acts through him, originates. Thus
nni «. .1 arose the primitive form of
The Birth • u- u j j
, masques, m which men dressed
.. T^ themselves up to resemble
the Drama f 1
various creatures, real or
imaginary, as in the case of the animal
masques of old time ; lor according to
the popular idea the spirit dwells in the
external, visible form, and through the
imitation or adoption of its outward
appearance we become identified with
the spirit whose character we assume.
Among many races not only masks proper
were worn, but also the hides and hair or
feathers of the creatures personated.
Dramatic representation was furthered
by the dream plays — especially popular
among the American Indians — in which
the events of dreams are adapted for
acting and performed. Even as men
seek illumination in dreams as to questions
both divine and mundane, so do they
anticipate through dreams the dramatic
representations which shall be performed
on holidays as expressions of life.
Play is a degeneration of the dance,
and it arises less from the instinct for
beauty than from a desire to realise
whatever entertainment and excitement
may be got from any incident or occur-
rence. Erom another special inclination
originate those satirical songs of Northern
peoples, written in alternating verses,
SAVAGE DANCES: THE FAR-OFF BEGINNINGS OF THE DRAMA
Ji'nnf^ic''! \s ^".effort to give symbolic expression to affairs and moods of everyday life. Thus the Zulu wedding
dance is self-evident in its purpose. The second illustration depicts a strange religious dance of the Australian
e^Sff .°nH^^h^ with otemism or animism, The third picture shows dancefs in Kandy endeavouring to ban th
evil spirits, and the last illustrates an Australian corroboree. From such sources the drama has been slowly evolved.
14
209
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
in which the national tribunal and the
voice of the people are given expression
at the same time. Thus they have a truly
educative character. These are the pre-
liminary steps to the free satire and
humour that gleam through the lives of
civilised peoples, now like the flicker of a
candle, now like a purifying lightning
A t & PI flash, freeing men from life's
. '". *^ monotony, and illuminating
L'f f M ^^^ night of unsolved questions.
Capacity for organised play is a
characteristic that hfts man above the
lower animals. The expression of individu-
ality without any particular object in view,
the elevation of self above the troubles of
life, and free activity, uncoerced by the
necessities of existence, are characteristic
both of play and of art. Thus play, as well
as art, exhibits to a pre-eminent degree
man's consciousness of having escaped, if
only temporarily, from the coercion of
environing nature ; being without definite
object, it proves that he can find employ-
ment when released from the pressure of
the outer world — that is, when he is
momentarily freed from his endeavour
to establish a balance between himself
and the necessities of life, with a view to
overcoming the latter. Man stands in
close connection with his environment
and with the immutable laws of nature ;
but in play and in art he develops his own
personality — a development that neither
in direction nor in object is influenced
by the outer world and its constraint.
The step that leads to the overcoming
of custom is the recognition of right.
" Right " is that which society strictly
demands from every individual member.
Not all that is customary is exacted by
right ; a multitude of the requirements of
custom may be ignored without opposi-
tion from the community as a whole,
although, of course, detached individuals
may express their displeasure. The aggre-
gate, however, grants immunity to all who
F 11 f M *^° "°^ choose to follow the
and Rise custom. In other words, the
ofthe'Racc separation of custom from
right signifies the develop-
ment of a sharper line of demarcation be-
tween that which is and that which ought
to be. In primitive times " is " and
" ought to be " are fairly consonant terms ;
but gradually a spirit of opposition is de-
veloped ; cases arise in which custom is
oj^posed, in which the actions of men run
counter to a previous habit. Man is
210
conscious of the possibility of raising him-
self above the unreasoning tendencies
toward certain modes of conduct, and he
takes pleasure in so doing — the good man
as well as the evil. Whoever oversteps
the bounds of custom, even through sheer
egotism, is also a furtherer of human
development ; without sin the world
would never have evolved a civilisation ;
the Fall of Man was nothing more than
the first step toward the historical de-
velopment of the human race.
This leads to the necessity for extracting
from custom such rules as must prove
advantageous to mankind, and this collec-
tion of axioms — which " ought to be " —
becomes law.
The distinction between right and
custom was an important step. The
relativity of custom was exposed with one
stroke. Many, and by no means the worst
members of communities, emancipate
themselves from custom. It is the opening
in the wall through which the progress of
humanity may pass. Nor do the demands
of right remain unalterable and unyielding.
A change in custom brings with it a
_ change in right ; certain rules
„. , ^ ' of conduct gradually become
Right, and • i - j • j. ^.u "
j^ .. isolated owing to the recession
of custom, and to such an ex-
tent that they lose their vitality and decay.
And as new customs arise, so are new
principles of right discovered. In this
manner an alteration in the one is a cause
of change in the other — naturally, in
conformity with the degree of culture
and contemporary social relations. Custom
and right mutually further each other,
and render it possible for men to adapt
themselves to newly acquired conditions
of civilisation.
Together with right and custom a
third factor appears — morality. This is
a comparatively late acquisition. It, too,
contains something of the " ought to be,"
not because of the social, but by virtue
of the divine authority or order based on
philosophical conceptions. Morals vary,
therefore, as laws vary, according to
peoples and to times. The rules of morality
form a second code, set above the social
law, and they embody a larger aggregate
of duties. The reason for this is that men
recognise that the social system of rules for
conduct is not the only one, that it is only
relative and cannot include all the duties
of human beings, and that over and beyond
the laws of society ethical principles exist.
THE HIGHER PROGRESS OF MANKIND
Naturally conflicts arise between right
and morals, and such struggles lead to
further development and progress.
The late appearance of ideas of morality
proves that ethical considerations were
originally foreign to the god-concep-
tions. The spirits, fetiches, and world-
creators of different beliefs are at first
neutral so far as morals are concerned ;
myths and legends are invented partly
from creation theories, partly from historic
data, and partly through efforts of the
imagination. In primitive beliefs there is
no trace of an attempt to conceive of
deities as being good in the highest — or
even in a lower — sense ; and it would not
be in accordance with scientific ethnology
to appraise, or to wish to pass judgment on,
religions according to the point of view
of ethics. Not until the importance of
morality in life is realised, and the
profound value of a life of moral purity
recognised, do men seek in their religious
beliefs for higher beings of ethical signifi-
cance, for morally perfect personalities
among the gods.
Different elements of civilisation vary
greatly in their development in different
civilised dis-
tricts; one
race may have a
greater tendency
toward intellec-
tual, another
toward material
culture. No race
has approached
the Hindoos in
philosophic
speculation, yet
they are as chil-
dren in their
knowledge of
natural science.
One people may
develop com-
merce to the
highest extent,
another poetr}'
and music, a
third the free-
dom of the in-
dividual. The
language of the
American I n -
dians is in many respects richer and more
elegant than English. Therefore nothing
is farther from the truth than to say that,
in case one institution of civilised life is
THE EMBLEM OF A TRIBE: ALASKAN INDIAN TOTEM
This mysterious " totem " disting:uishes a family or tribe of
the old Hydah Indians and is erected at Wrangel in Alaska.
found to exist in a hunting people, another
in an agricultural race, or the one in an
otherwise higher, and the other in an other-
wise lower nation or tribe, the institution
in question must have reached a state of
perfection corresponding with the general
development of the people possessing it.
According to this, the monogamic uncivil-
ised races were further advanced than the
polygamous Aryans of India and the Mo-
hammedans ; and the Polynesians, with
their skill in the industrial arts and their
dramatic dances, perhaps in a higher state
of civilisation than Europeans !
Development fulfils itself in communi-
ties of men. Except in a human aggre-
gate it cannot come to pass ; for the germs
of development which are brought forth
by the potentiated activity of the many
may exist only in a society of individuals.
It has therefore been a significant fact
that from the very beginning men have
joined together in social aggregates, partly
on account of an instinctive impulse,
partly because of the necessity for self-
defence. Thus it came about that primi-
tive men lived together in wandering, pre-
datory hordes, or packs. The individuals
were bound to
one another very
( losel}'; there was
no private life ;
and the sex-
relationships were
prom iscuous.
Men not only
dwelt together
in groups, but
the groups them-
selves assimilated
with one another,
inasmuch as mar-
riages were re-
ciprocally entered
into by them. So
far as we are able
to determine, one
of the earliest of
social institutions
was that of group-
marriage. Indi-
viduals did not
first unite in
pairs, and then
join together in
groups — such would soon have fallen
asunder ; on the contrary, group-marriage
itself created the bond that held the
community together ; the most violent
211
THE BEGINNINGS OF MONARCHY : AFRICAN CHIEF SEATED IN STATE AMONG HIS HEADMEN
The tribal state has a fixed form of government. The chiefs or patriarchs of the various famiUes stand at the
head of affairs, the position of chief being either hereditary or elective. In most cases, however, it is determined by
a combination of both methods, a blood descendant being chosen, provided he is able to give proof of his competence.
in.stinct of mankind not only united the
few but the many, indeed, complete social
aggregates.
Group-marriage is the form of union
established by the association of two
hordes, or packs, according to which the
men of one group marry the women of the
other ; not a marriage of individual men
with individual women, but a promis-
cu(.us relationship, each man of one group
marrying all the women of the other
group — at least in theory — and vice versa ;
not a marriage of individuals, but of
aggregates. Certainly with such a sex-
relationship established, sooner or later
regulations develop from within the com-
munity, through which the marital rela-
tionships of individuals are adjusted in a
consistent manner ; but the principle
first followed was, as community in pro-
perty, so community in marriage ; and
this must of itself lead to kinships
entirely different from those with which
we are familiar.
Group-marriage was closely bound up
with religious conceptions ; single hordes,
or packs, considered themselves the em-
212
bodiment of a single spirit. And since at
that time spirits were onl}' conceived of
as things that existed in nature, the horde
felt itself to be a single class of natural ob-
ject— some animal or plant, for example ;
and the union of one pack with another
was analogous to the union of one animal
with another. Each group believed itself
to be permeated by the spirit of a certain
species of animal, borrowed its name thence
and the animal species itself was looked
upon as the protecting spirit. The ances-
tral spirit was worshipped in the animal,
and the putting to death or injuring of
an individual of the species was a serious
offence.
Such a belief is called Totemism.
" Totem " — a word borrowed from the
language of the Massachusetts Indians —
is the natural object or animal assumed
as the emblem of the horde or tribe, and
correspondingly the group symbolised by
the class of animal or natural object is
called a Totem-group.
This belief led to a close union of all who
were partakers of the spirit of the same
animal ; it also strictly determined which
THE HIGHER PROGRESS OF MANKIND
groups could associate with one another.
And as the totem-group mimicked the
animal in its dances, and fancied itself to
be possessed by its spirit, it also ordered
the methods of partaking of food, and
all marriage, birth, and death ceremonies
in accordance with this conception. It is
said that, the totem being exogamous,
marriages were not possible within the
totem, but only without it. Precisely
so; for the original conception was not
that individuals formed unions, but that
the whole totem entered the marriage
relationship ; a single marriage would have
been considered an impossibihty.
To which totem the children belonged —
to the mother's, to the father's, or to a
third totem — was a question that offered
considerable difficulty. All three possi-
bilities presented themselves ; the last
mentioned, however, only in case the child
belonged to another group, a sub-totem,
and in that event its descendants could
return to the original totem.
Descent in the male 'or in the female
line occasioned in later times the rise of
important distinctions between nations.
If a child follow the mother's
The First ^^^gj^^ ^e speak of " maternal
, *f . . kinship " ; conversely, of " pa-
ofKmship ^g^^^j kmship" in case of
heredity through the father. Which of these
is the more primitive, or did tribes from
the very first adopt either one or the other
system, thus making them of equal anti-
quity, is a much-vexed question. There is
reason to believe that maternal kinship
is the more primitive form, and that races
have either passed with more or less
energy and rapidity to the system of
descent through males, or have kept to the
original institution of maternal succession.
There are many peoples among whom
both forms of kinship exist, and in such
instances the maternal is undoubtedly the
more primitive ; from this it appears very
probable that development has thus
taken place, the more so since there are
traces of maternal kinship to be found in
races whose established form is paternal.
As time passed, marriage of individuals
developed from group-marriage or to-
temism. Such unions may be polygamous
— one man having several wives — or poly-
androus — one woman having several hus-
bands. Both forms have been represented
in mankind, and, indeed, polygamy is the
general rule among all races, excepting
Occidental civilised peoples. The form
Growth
of
Marriage
of marriage toward which civilisation is
advancing is certainly monogamy ; through
it a complete individual relationship is
established between man and wife ; and
although both individualities may have
independent expression, each is reconciled
to the other through the loftier associa-
tion of both. Nearly associated with
monogamy is the belief in
imion after death ; it arises
from the religious beliefs pre-
valent among many peoples.
Among other races there is at least the
custom of a year of mourning, sometimes
for husband, sometimes for wife, often
for both.
Marriage of individuals has developed in
different ways from group or totem
marriage : sometimes it was brought about
through lack of subsistence occasioned by
many men dwelling together ; sometimes
it arose from other causes. One factor
was the practice of wife-capture : whoever
carried off a wife freed her, as it were, from
the authority of the community, and
established a separate marriage for himself.
Marriage by purchase was an outcome of
marriage by capture and of the paying of an
indemnity to the relatives of the bride ;
men also learned to agree beforehand as to
the equivalent to be paid. The practice of
acquiring wives by purchase developed in
various directions, especially in that of
trading wives and in the earning of wives
by years of service. Gradually the purchase
became merely a feigned transaction ; and
a union of individuals has evolved — now
sacerdotal, now civil in form — from which
every trace of traffic and of exchange has
disappeared.
Thus already in early times marriage had
become ennobled through religion. It is
a widespread idea that through partaking
of food in common, blood-brotherhood, or
similar procedures, a mystic communion
of soul may be established ; and in case of
marriages brought about by the mediation
. . of a priesthood the priest in-
Rehgion yokes the divine consecration.
i\no^ es Marriage is thereby raised above
Marriage ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ profane actions
of life ; it receives a certain guarantee of
permanency ; indeed, in many cases, by
reason of the mystic communion of souls,
it is looked upon as absolutely indissoluble.
The ownership of property also was
originally communistic, and the idea of
individual possession has been a gradual
development. The idea of the ownership
213
THE IDEA OF MARRIAGE: WEDDING CUSTOMS IN MANY LANDS
In countries where women are subservient to men the idea of niarriage by captu^^ by cojupulsion g-^-ls.^. The
Bedouin bride (^) makes a pretence of escapmg and is pursued ^^Y tl^bndegroom and h^s ^cms^ e .^ ^^^ .^
':l ft^e-ct^'^fcSft^y.^T.^ ^-^- ^'^^-- ^"^ ^-^^■"^'
214
THE HIGHER PROGRESS OF MANKIND
of land, especially when developed by
agricultural peoples, is of a communistic
nature ; and, from common possession,
family and individual ownership gradually
comes into being. It is brought about in
various ways, chiefly through the division
of land among separate families : at first
only temporary, held only until the time
for a succeeding division arrives ; later,
owned in perpetuity. Nor was it a rare
method of procedure to grant land to any
one who desired to cultivate it — an estate
that should be his so long as he remained
upon it and cultivated the
soil, but which reverted to
the community, on his leaving
it. There gradually developed
a constant relationship be-
tween land and cultivator
as agriculture became more
extended and lasting improve-
ments were effected on the
soil. Land became the per-
manent property of the in-
dividual ; it also became an
article of commerce.
Ownership of movable pro-
perty even was at first
of commvmistic character.
Clothing and weapons, en-
chantments effectual for the
individual alone, such as
medicine-bags or amulets,
were, to be sure, assigned to
individuals in very early
times ; but all property ob-
tained by labour, the products
of the chase or of fishing,
originally belonged to the
community, until in later days
each family was allowed to
claim the fruits of its own
toil, and was only pledged to
share with the others under
certain conditions. Finally,
individuals were permitted to
retain or to barter property
which they had produced by
labour ; and exchange, especially exchange
between individuals, attained special sig-
nificance through the division of labour.
The individualisation of the ownership
of movable property was especially
furthered by members of families perform-
ing other labour, outside the family, in
addition to their work within the family
circle. Although the fruit of all labour
accomplished within the family was shared
by the members in common, the results
of work done outside became the property
of the particular individiial who had
performed the labour. Consequent expan-
sion of the conception of labour led rnen
to one of the greatest triumphs of justice,
to the idea of establishing individual rights
in ideas and in combinations of ideas, to
the recognition of intellectual or imma-
terial property — right of author or inven-
tor—one of the chief incentives to modern
civilisation.
On the other hand, individual rights in
transactions led to conceptions concerning
THE CHURCH AND MARRIAGE: A WEDDING SCENE
In very early times marriage had assumed a religious significance and came
to be regarcled among the sacred as opposed to the secular functions of Ufa.
obligations and debts. Exchange, either
direct or on terms of credit, brought wilh
it duties and liabilities for which originally
the persons and lives of the individuals
concerned were held in pledge, until
custody of the body — which also included
possession of the corpse of a debtor —
was succeeded by public imprisonment
for debt, and finally by the_ mere pledg-
ing of property, imprisonment for debt
having been abolished — a course of
215
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
development through which the most
varied of races have passed.
The relation of the individual to his
possessions led men at first to place mov-
able property in graves, in order that it
might be of service to the departed owner
during the life beyond ; hence the universal
custom of burning on funeral pyres not
only weapons and utensils, but
*^ ^ animals, slaves, and even wives.
p In later times men were satis-
** *" ^ fied with symbolic immolations,
or possessions were released from the
ban of death and put into further use.
The property of the deceased reverted to
his family, and thus the right of inheritance
arose. There was no right of inheritance
during the days of communism ; on the
death of a member of the family a mere
general consolidation of property resulted ;
with individual property arose the rever-
sion of possessions to the family from
which they had been temporarily separated.
Thus property either reverted to the family
taken as a whole, or to single heirs, certain
members of the family ; hence a great
variety of procedure arose. Up to the
present day inheritance b\^ all the children,
or inheritance by one alone, exists in
Eastern Asia as m Western nations.
In like manner criminal responsibility
was originally collective ; the family or
clan was held responsible for the actions
of all its individual members except those
who were renounced and made outcasts.
Such methods of collective surety still
exist among many exceedingly developed
peoples ; but the system is gradually
dying awa}^ the tendency being for the
entire responsibility to rest upon the
individual alone.
The state is a development of tribal, or
patri-archal, society. The tribal group is
a community of intermarried families, all
claiming descent from a common ancestor.
From tribal organisation the principle is
developed that participation in the com-
_ . . miuiity is open only to such
ginning individuals as belong to one or
^ .. other of the families of which
Community , , ,,
it IS com]:)osed ; and the
political body thus made up of individuals
related either by blood or through marriage
is called a patriarchal, or tribal, state.
This form of community was enlarged even
in very early times, advantage being taken
of the possibility of adopting strangers
into the circle of related families, and of
amalgamating with them. Still, the funda-
2l6
mental idea that the community is com-
posed of related families always remains
uppermost in the minds of uncivilised
peoples. The tribal state gradually
develops into the territorial state. The
con-nection of the community with a
definite region becomes closer ; strange
tribes settle in the same district ; they are
permitted to remain provided tribute is
paid and services are performed, and are
gradually absorbed into the community,
the strangers and the original inhabitants —
plebeians and patricians — united together
into one aggregate. Thus arises the con-
ception of a state which any man may
join without his being a member of any
one of the original clans or families.
In this way the idea of a state becomes
distinct from that of a people bound
together by kinship, the latter being
especially distinguished by a certain unity
of external appearance, custom, character,
and manner of thought. This is not
intended to suggest that an amalgamation
of different race elements in a state and an
assimilation of different modes of thought
and of feeling are not desirable, or that a
^ .1 , spirit analogous to the sense
Growth of 'f •, ■ ^ 1 r .1
. la ^^ unity m members of the
f St t ^'"^""'e family is not to be sought
for ; such a condition is most
likely to be attained if a certain tribe or
clan take precedence of the others, as the
most progressive, to which the various
elements of the people annex themselves.
The tribal state has a fixed form of
government. The chiefs or patriarchs of
the various families stand at the head of
affairs, the position of chief being either
hereditary or elective. In most cases,
however, it is determined by a combina-
tion of both methods, a blood descendant
being chosen provided he is able to give
proof of his competence. In addition
there is often the popular assembly. In
later times many innovations are intro-
duced. Passion for power united to a
strong personality often leads to a chief-
tainship in which all rights and privileges
are absorbed or united in the person of one
individual ; so that he appears as the
possessor of all prerogatives and titles,
those of other men being entirely second-
ary, and all being more or less dependent
upon his will. Religious conceptions,
esfiecially, have had great influence in this
connection. Nowhere is this so clearly
shown as in " teknonymy," an institution
formerly prevalent in the South Pacific
"IN THE NA.ME OF JUSTICE": SOME OLD METHODS OF TORTURE
These pictures represent : i, Roman gaolers cutting off a Christian's ears. a. The cangue as still used in China,
r A prisoner on the rack in Mediaeval England. 4. Torture of the Iron Chair. 5. The ordeal of fire and branding.
217
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
islands, according to which the soul of the
father is supposed to enter the body of his
eldest son at the birth of the latter, and
that therefore, immediately from his birth,
the son becomes master, the father con-
tinuing the management of affairs merely
as his proxy. Other peoples have avoided
such consequences as these by suj)i)osing
the child to be possessed by the
" " . soul of his grandfather, thcre-
Ch" f "" ^^^^ naming first-born males
after their grandfathers instead
of after their fathers. Another outcome of
the institution of chieftainship is the
chaotic order of affairs which rules among
man}^ peoples on the death of the chieftain,
continuing until a successor is seated on the
throne — a lawless interval of anarchy
followed by a regency.
The power of a chieftain is, however,
usually limited by class rights ; that
is, by the rights of sub-chieftains of
especially cUstinguished families, and of
the popular assembly, among which
elements the division of }:)ower and of
jurisdiction is exceedingly varied. These
primitive institutions are rude prototypes
of future varieties of coercive govern-
ment, of kingship, either of aristocratic
or of republican form, in which the primi-
tive idea of chieftainship as the absorption
of all private privileges is given up, and in
its place the various principles of rights
and duties of government enter.
Class-difterentigition with attendant
privileges and prerogatives is especially
developed in warlike races, and in nations
which must be ever prejiared to resist
the attacks of enemies, by the establish-
ment of a militant class. The militant
class occupies an intermediate jjosilion
between the governing, ])riest, and scholar
( lasses on the one hand, and the industrial
class — agriculturists, craftsmen, merchants
—on the other. Employment in warfare,
necessary discijiline, near association with
the chieftain, and the holding of fiefs lor
_ . material suj)port give to this
Growth , ' ' '^. -r,
,.,.,.. class a unique position. Ihus
of Military ,, • / i i i •
-,. the warrior castes developed in
India, the feudal and military
nol)ility in Ja))an, the nobility in (iermany,
with obligations and service to feudal
superiors and to the Court. This system
survives for many years, until at last
leudal tenure gradually disappears, and
its attendant prerogatives are swallowed
up by all classes through a universal
subjection to military service ; although
2i8
even yet a distinct class of professional
soldiers remains at the head of military
affairs and operations, and will continue
to do so as long as there is a possibility of
internal or external warfare. However,
here too the militant class is absorbed into
a general body of officials. Officials are
citizens who not only occupy the usual
position of members of the state, but to
whom in addition is appointed the execu-
tion of the life functions of the nation, as its
organs ; in other words, such functions as
are peculiar to the civic organisation in
contradistinction to the general functions
exercised and actions performed by indi-
vidual citizens as independent units.
Officialism includes to a special degree
duty to its calling and to the public trust,
and there are also special privileges
granted to officials within the sphere
appointed for them.
In a society governed by a chieftain, as
well as in a monarchy, there is a jwpular
assembly or consultative body ; either an
unorganised meeting of individuals, or an
organised convention of estates founded
on class right. A modern development,
that certainly had its proto-
Thc Birth ^yp^ .^ ^^^ patriarchal state, is
1 ,. ^ the representative assembly.
Parliaments ^ , , r • j- j i
an assembly of individuals
chosen to represent the people in place of
the popular gathering. The English
Government, with its representative legis-
lative bodies, is a typical example in
modern civilisation.
One of the chief problems encountered
not only in a society ruled by a chieftain,
Init also in states of later devel()j)ment,
whether governed by a potentate or by
an aristocracy, is the relation of tem-
poral to sjnritual power. Sometimes both
are united in the head of the state, as in
the cases of the Incas of Peru and of the
Caliphate. Sometimes the spiritual head
is distinct and separate from the temporal ;
frequently the two forces are nearly asso-
ciated, a member of the imperial family
being chosen for the office of high-priest,
as among the Aztecs. Often, however, the
two functions are comjiletely indej^endent
of each other, as among many African
races, the medicine-man occupying a posi-
tion entirely independent of the chieftain.
Such separation may, of course, lead to
friction and civil war ; it may also become
an element furthering to civilisation, a
source of new ideas, opening the way to
alliances between nations, and setting
THE HIGHER PROGRESS OF MANKIND
bounds to the tyranny of individuals, as
exemplified in the relation of the Papacy
to the Holy Roman Emj)ire.
The form of state in which the functions
of government are exercised by a chieftain
contributes greatly to state control and
enforcement of justice. The realisation of
right had been from the first a social
function ; but its enforcement
was incumbent on the unit
groups of individuals (families
or tribes bound together by
friendship). The acquisition by the state
of the power to dispense justice and to
make and enforce law is one of the greatest
events of the world's history. The idea
of all right being incorporated in the
chieftain (and social classes) played an
important part in bringing about this
condition of affairs ; for as soon as this
State Justice
a Momentous
Step Forward
typical of the effect of the curse of God.
Already in primitive times religion led to
a strange idea of justice — secret societies
consecrated by the deity took upon them-
selves the function of enforcing right,
instituting reigns of terror in their dis-
tricts, maintaining order in society, and
claiming authorisation from the god with
whose spirit they were permeated. Later,
influenced by all these causes, the social
aggregate took over the control of justice.
It was already considered to be the
upholder of right, the servant of the deity,
the maintainer of public peace, the dis-
penser of atoning sacrifices, etc. ; and so
the various elements conceived of as
justice, which had previously been dis-
tributed among the single families, tribes,
associations, and societies, were combined,
and placed under state control.
AN EARLY EGYPTIAN REPRESENTATION OF JUSTICE Mansell
" The Judgment of the Dead " as illustrated by innumerable paintings on the walls of Egyptian temples and tombs.
conception receives general acceptance,
the chieftain, and with him the state,
become interested in the preservation and
enforcement of justice, even in its lower
forms in the common rights of the sub-
jects. On the other hand, not only the
interests of chieftainship, but also those
of agriculture and commerce, are furthered
by the preservation of internal peace ;
and internal peace calls for state control
of justice and enforcement of law.
Moreover the religious element worked
to the same end. Wickedness was held
to be an injury to the deity, whose anger
would be visited upon the entire land — a
conception that lasted far into the Middle
Ages, and according to which the fate of
Sodom and Gomorrah was held to be
Certain forms for the dispensation of
justice, judging of crimes, and determining
of punishments were developed. Thus arose
the different forms of judicial procedure,
which for a long time bore a religious
character. The deity was called upon to
decide as to right and wrong — divinity in
_ „ the form of natural forces.
_* "^ *" . Hence the judgments of God
jj,. . ^ ° through trial by water, fire.
Religion . ® , -^ , ' '
poison, serpents, scales, or —
especially in Germany during the Middle
Ages — combat, or decision by the divining
eye, that was closely allied to the so-called
trial by hazard. A peculiar variety of
ordeal Js that of the bier, according to
which the body of a murdered man is
called into requisition, the soul of the
219
I j^^-:
Wllm^:
-' ' k ' t
i
- 1 "^
^-
iK^^
i
^^k , "*^;^^
WW^
r
221
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
victim assisting in the discovery of the
murderer. Ordeals are undergone some-
times by one individual, sometimes by
two. An advance in progress is the curse,
which takes the place of the ordeal, the
curse of God being called down upon an
individual and his family in case of wrong-
doing or of perjury. The curse rnay be
uttered by an individual in co-
operation with the members of
. ^ families. Thus arise ordeals by
invocation and by oath with
compurgators. Originally a certain period
of time was allowed to pass — a month,
for example — for the fulfilment of the
curse. In later times, whoever took
the oath — oath of innocence — was held
guiltless. Witnesses succeeded to con-
jurers ; divining looks were replaced
by circumstantial evidence ; and, instead
of a mystic, a rational method of obtaining
testimony was adopted. The develop-
ment was not attained without certain
attendant abuses; and the abolition of
ordeal by God was among many peoples
— notably the inhabitants of Eastern Asia,
the American Indians, and the Germans
of the Middle Ages — succeeded by the
introduction of torture. In many lands
torture stood in close connection with the
judgment of God ; in others it originated
either directly or indirectly in slavery.
According to the method of obtaining
evidence by torture, the accused was
forced through physical pain to disclosures
concerning himself and his companions,
and, in case he himself were considered
guilty, to a confession. However barbarous
and irrational, this system was employed
in Latin and Germanic nations excepting
England, until the eighteenth century, in
some instances even until the nineteenth.
Judgment was first pronounced in the
name of God ; in later times, in the name
of the people or of the ruler who appeared
as the representative of God. The prin-
ciples of justice, the validity of which at
Th SI ^^^^ depends upon custom, are
„ .... in later times proclaimed and
Building upr-, ^j r/-j
of La fixed as commands of God.
Thus systems of fixed right
come into being first in the form of sacred
justice, then as commands of God, and
finally as law. Law is a conception of
justice expressed in certain rules and prin-
ciples. Originally there were no laws ; the
standard for justice was furnished to each
individual by his own feelings ; only iso-
lated cases were recorded. As time
222
advanced, and great men who strove to
bring about an improvement in justice
arose above the generality of mankind ;
when the ruling class became differentiated
from the other classes ; when it was found
necessary to root out certain popular cus-
toms— then, in addition to the original
collection of precedents, there arose law of
a higher form : law that stood above prece-
dent, that altered custom, and opened up
new roads to justice. Great codes of law
have not been compilations only ; they
have led justice into new paths. Originally
a law was looked upon as an inviolable com-
mand of God, as unalterable and eternal ;
its interpretation alone was earthly and
transitory. As years passed, men learned
to recognise that laws themselves were
transitory ; and it became a principle
that later enactments "could alter earlier
rules. The relations of later statutes to
already established law, and how the laws
of different nations influence one another,
are difficult, much- vexed questions for the
solution of which special sciences have de-
veloped— transitory and international law.
Judgment and law are intimately concerned
with justice, the conception
of right as evolved from the
double action of life and cus-
tom. To this development
of justice is united an endeavour of the state
or government not only to further welfare
by means of the creation and administra-
tion of law, but also to take under its con-
trol civilising institutions of all sorts.
This was originally a feature of justice
itself ; certain practices inimical to civilisa-
tion were interdicted and made punish-
able offences. Already in the Middle Ages
systems of police played a great part among
governmental institutions, especially in
the smaller states. Subsequently the idea
was developed that not only protection
through the punishment of crime, but also
superintendence of and promotion of the
public weal, should be administered by law;
and thus the modern state developed with
its policy of national welfare. With this
arose the necessity for a sharper distinction
to be drawn between justice and the various
actions of an administration ; and thus in
modern times men have come to the system
— based on Montesquieu — of the separation
of powers and independence of justice.
Justice varies according to the develop-
ment of civilisation, and according to the
function that it must perform in this
development ; in like manner every age
Evolution
of the
Modern State
THE HIGHER PROGRESS OF MANKIND
creates its own material and spiritual
culture. Every poet is a poet of his own
time.
The notion of natural right, however
unhistorical it was in itself, characterised
a period of transition in so far as it enabled
men to form a historical conception — a con-
ception of what might be : for, by con-
trasting actual with ideal justice, we are
enabled to esca'pe the bonds of the opinions
of a particular time, and to look upon such
opinions and views objectively and in-
dependently. Yet it is certainly a foolish
proceeding to consider an ideal, deduced
principally from conceptions and opinions
of the present, to be a standard by which
to measure the value of historical events
of all times, sitting in judgment over the
great names of the past with the air of an
inspector of morals. The office of the his-
torian as judge of the dead is quite differ-
ently constitut'^d. Every age must be
judged in accordance with the relation
which it bears to the totality of develop-
ment ; and every historical personage is
to be looked upon as a bearer of the spirit
of his day, as a servant of the ideas of his
_. , _,, time. Thus it is quite as
Right Way , ^ 1
* . wrong to pronounce moral
lO V lew , 1 r 1 *
„. ^ censure on the men ol his-
History , ... , . ,
tory, as it is wrong to judge
an era merely according to its good or
evil characteristics. A period must be
e^;timated according to what it has
either directly or indirectly accomplished
for mankind.
There are common factors of civilisation
shared by nations themselves, through
which many contradictions disappear.
The religious civilisatio-is of Christian-
ity, Mohammedanism. Judaism, Buddh-
ism and Confucianism have been the
determining factors of the intellectual
and emotional life, even influencing the
course of events, in vast regions. And
thus it is also comprehensible that in
the judicial life of nations there is an
endeavour for a closer approach, and
also the existence of equalising tendencies.
In spite of countless variations in detail,
there is a certain unity of law in the
entire Mohammedan world ; and although
the hope of establishing the unity of
Roman canonistic law over the whole
of Christendom has not been realised
none the less it was a tremendous idea :
that of a universal empire founded on the
Roman law of the imperators, and placed
under the rule of the German emperor, thus
ensuring the continuance of the law of the
Roman people — an idea that swayed the
intellects of the Middle Ages up to the
fourteenth, even to the fifteenth century,
and according to which the emperor would
have been the head of all Europe, the other
sovereigns merely his vassals or fief-holders.
This idea, once advocated by such a
great spirit as that of Dante,
onccp ion j^^^^^ ^-j^.^ many others, passed
»i •. J »ir I J into oblivion ; and in its
United World , , .' ^,
place has arisen the con-
ception of independent laws of nations.
Yet the original idea has had great
influence : it has led to a close union of
Christian peoples ; it opened a way for
Roman law to become universal law,
although, to be sure, English law, com-
pletely independent of that of Rome,
has grown to unparalleled proportions as
a universal system, entirely by reason of
the marvellous success of the English
people as colonists. Likewise international
commerce will of itself lead to a unifica-
tion of mercantile, admiralty, copyright,
and patent law.
Then the idea of an international league
must develop, arising from the idea of the
unity of Christian nations. We have
advanced a great distance beyond the
time when every foreigner was con-
sidered an enemy, and when all foreign
phenomena were looked upon as strange
or with antipathy. Rules for inter-
national commerce are developed ; state
alliances are entered into for the further-
ance of common interests and for the
preservation of peace. Many tasks
which in former times would have
been executed by the empire are now
undertaken by international associations ;
and the time for the establishment of
international courts of arbitration for the
adjustment of differences between states
is already approaching.
It also seems probable that states will
unite to form political organisations,
^ wholly or partially renouncing
Common xt, • ^ -i- ti
, . . - their separate Tjositions. Ihus
Interests of .. ^ -n i ^ i .
j^ . . . nations will be replaced by a
federal state, and a multitude
of unifying ideas which would otherwise
be accomplished with difficulty will come
to easy realisation. Federal states were
already in existence during the times of
patriarchal communities : an especially
striking example is that of the admirably
constituted federation of the Iroquois
nations.
223
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
The vision of no man may pierce
through to the ultimate end of the pro-
cesses of history, and to advance hypotheses
is a vain endeavour — quite as vain as it
would be to expect Plato to have foretold
the life of modern civilisation or the im-
perial idea of mediaeval times, or Dante to
have foreseen modern industrialism or the
,, . , character of industrial peoples.
Universal i- j . ■
_, . . 1 0-day we are more certam
, ^ ,, than ever that no process of
of Culture , , , . ^ . ,
development, however simple
it may have been, has ever taken place
according to a fixed model ; all develop-
ments have had their own individualities
according to place and to time. Thus we
must forego discussion of the future.
However, there is another point of view.
Development of nations as well as of
individuals leads either to progress or to
decay. No people may hope to live
eternally ; and how many acquisitions
already gained will be lost in the future it
is impossible to say. If a nation declines,
it either becomes extinct or is annihilated
by another state ; it becomes identitied
with the newer nation, and disappears
with its own character ; thus its civilisa-
tion may also disappear. This is a serious
possibility. It is the Medusa head of the
world's history which we must face — and
without stiffening to stone.
There is one truth, however, the know-
ledge of which fills us with hope for the
future : it is the fact that the results of
development and civilisation are often
transfused from one people to another,
so that a given development need not
start again from the very beginning.
This is owing to the capacity which races
have for absorbing or borrowing civilisa-
tions. Absorption of culture is by no
means universal ; it does not prevent the
occasional disappearance of civilisation,
for every civilisation has before it at least
the possibility of death. Nevertheless the
transmission and assimilation of culture
... , is constantly taking place.
„ , Ihere are various ways in
Peoples on i ■ u ■*. i u u^
One Another ^'i'^l^'^ '\ ^^^y ^'^ brought
al)out. A conquering nation
may bring its own civilisation with it to the
conquered ; culture is often forced upon
the latter by coercive measures. The con-
querors may acquire culture from the
vanquished ; or assimilation of culture
may come about without the subjection
of a people, through the unconscious
adoption of external customs and internal
324
modes of thought. Finally, culture may
be borrowed consciously from one nation
by another, the one state becoming con-
vinced of the outward advantages and inner
significance of the foreign civilisation.
In this way the problem of develop-
ment becomes very complicated ; many
institutions of vanished races thus con-
tinue to live on. Certainly the race that
acquires a foreign civilisation must, among
other things, be so constituted in its
motives and aspirations as to lose the very
nerves of its being, its very stability, in
order that, intoxicated with the joy of a
new life, all traces of its past existence may
be allowed to break up and disappear.
On the other hand, many a promising
germ of culture possessed by a vigorous
people may come to grief, owing to the
influence of acquisitions from without.
But, in return, a race that knows how to
assimilate foreign culture may obtain a
civilisation of such efficiency as it would
never before have been capable of attain-
ing, by reason of the fact that its power
is established on a recently acquired basis,
and because it has been spared a multitude
of faltering experiments.
rogress Civilisation may be mutu-
P J, ally obtained from reciprocal
action, nations both giving and
taking. Such a relation naturally arises
when states enter into intercourse with
one another, when they have become
acquainted with one another's various
institutions and are able to recognise the
great merits of foreign organisations and
the defects of their own. Especially the
world's commerce, in which every nation
wishes to remain a competitor, compels
towards mutual acceptance of custom and
law ; no nation desires to be left behind ;
and each discovers that it will fall to the
rear unless it borrow certain things from
the others. Such reciprocal action will
be the more effective the more like nations
are to one another, the better they under-
stand each other, and the more often they
succeed not only in adopting the outward
forms, but in absorbing the jirinciples of
foreign institutions into their own beings.
Thus we may hope that even if the
nations of to day decay and disappear,
the labour of the world's progress will not
be lost ; it will constantly reappear in new
communities which may rejoice in that
for which we have striven, and which we
have acquired by the exertion of our own
powers, Joseph Kohler
THE SEVEN WONDERS OF ANCIENT CIVILISATION
BB
W
By HAROL
The Temple of Diana at Ephesus speaks:
The sun standeth in the high places of the
mountains,
Full of brightness and mirth is the dawn.
But my loveliness is not shamed by him,
Neither is it diiimied ;
For, behold ;ind consider well, the sun is not
more than thought. [shall be :
That which yesterday I was, to-morrow I
I live : I wear u pon my brow the moving ages
and the spirit of man,
And genius, and art :
These things are more wonderful than the sun.
Senseless is the stone in the earth, [night ;
And the granite is not more than the formless
The alabaster knoweth not the dayspring.
Porphyry is blind,
And marble is without understanding ;
Bui let Ctesiphon pass,
Or Daedalus, or Chresiphon,
And fix his eyes, full of the divine flash.
Upon the ground where the rocks slumber,
And lo, they awake, they tremble, they are
stricken with understanding ; [eyelid,
The granite, lifting some vague and troubled
Struggleth to behold his master :
The rock feeletli within himself the breathing
of the unhewn statue, [darkness.
The marble stirs in the midnight of his
Because that he is aware of the soul of a man.
The buried alabaster desireth to rise up from
the grave.
Earth shudders, it trembleth violently.
It feels upon it the will of a man ;
And behold, beneath the gaze of him who
passeth with creation in his eyes.
From the deeps of the sacred earth
The suljlime palace comes forth and mounts
upward.
When she has made an end, the Gardens of
Babylon sing their laud of Semiramis :
Glory to Semiramis, [bridges
Who reared us up on the arches of the great
Whose span outraceth lime.
This great ([ueen was wont to delight herself
btrneath our floating branches ;
In the midst ol the ruin of two empires
She laughed in our groves,
She was happy in our green places ;
She conquered the kings of far countries.
And when the man had humbled himself
Lo, she would go upon her way, [before her.
She would come hither.
She would sigh gleefully under our branches,
Very pleasantly would she lie down on the
skins of panthers.
And alter the Gardens have sung, there is heard
the voice of the Mausoleum of Halicamassus :
I am the monument of a heart that knew
itself infinite ;
Death is not death beneath my dome of blue,
Beneath my dome, death is victory,
Death is lite. [precious stone
Here hath death so much of gold and of
That he boasteth himself thereof ;
Behold, 1 am the burial which is a pageant,
And the sepulchre which is a palace.
Then, like a great thunder, the voice of Jupiter :
I am the Olympian,
The lord of the muses ;
All that which hath life, or breath, or love, or
thought, or growth.
of Victor Hugo
D BEGBIE
Groweth, thinketh, liveth, loveth, and breatheih
in me. _ [feet
The incense of supplication which rises to my
Trembles with terror and affright ;
The slope of my brow doth touch the a,\is of
the world ;
The tempest speaketh with me before he
troubles the waters ;
I endure without age ;
I exist without pang ;
Unto me one thing only is impossible —
To die.
After Jupiter, from the island of Pharos sounds
the voice of the great Lighthouse :
In the midst of the mighty waters
I tarry for the ceasing of the centuries.
Sostratus the Cnitlian built me.
He built me that there might be thrown
Across the rolling waters,
And through the darkness where lurketh
destruction,
A rebuke to the lovely vanity of the stars.
After the Lighthouse, the Colossus at Rhodes :
I am the true Lighthouse.
Rhodes lies at my threshold.
Before the steadfast gaze of my un.sleeping eves
Winter maketh white the mountains. [mists;
I behold the deep waters in their cavernous
I am the sentinel whom none Cometh to relieve ;
I look forth upon the co "ing of the night,
And upon the coming of the dawn
I behold the lifting of the mists,
I behold the terror of the sea.
With the immense dreaming of Colossus.
And last speaks the Pyramid of Cheops :
The desert, spread like a table, lieth beneath
my foundations.
Lo, from some mysterious gateway of the night
I lift unto heaven my stair of terror.
And out of^the darkness itself seemeth it that I
am builded.
The sphinxes dropped their broods in the
caverns; [sighing;
The centuries went by ; the winds passed
And Cheops said again : I am eternal !
Then, after a profound silence, the creeping
worm of the sepulchre lifteth up his voice :
I say unto you Buildings that ye rise, and
arise still more !
Set ye up a stone above a stone.
Above cities lift yourselves up, O temples !
Lift up yourselves, like Babel !
Column r.bove column ;
Higher and yet higher ;
Let palaces arise upon the hollow places
And let nothingness be fastened upon the
foundations of night !
Ye are like smoke,
Therefore exalt yourselves with the clouds!
Set not an end to your boasting !
Mount up, mount up, for ever ! [wait.
Lo, in the dust beneath your feet I crawl and
Small am I, O mighty ones,
And yet I say unto you,
From the going down of the sun to his rising up,
From all the corners of the earth.
Everything which haih substance and which
The thing which is sorrowful, [hath being.
And the thing which is glad.
Descend unto me. [for ever,
And I only have strength, and I only endure
For behold, I am death.
325
THE HANGING GARDENS OF BABYLON
The Hanging: Gardens have been attributed to Semiramis. although Nebuchadnezzar is also said to have built them
to please one of his wives, who coming; from a hillv couut.y to Baby. on in the midst of a vast and barren plain
siifhed for some reminder of the leafy b-auty of her old home. The gardens, built in the form of a ^auar^
extending some 700 feet on each side, rose to a great heigiit in terrace uuon terrace supported by massive
pillars. A remarkable hydraulic system kept their multitudinous plants and trees in almost perpetual verdure.
226
^
THE PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT
For six thousand years the Pyramids have thrown their shadow across the sands of Egypt. The stone of which they
are bint wmdd make a great wall from Cairo to New York; the white marble which covered them would have built
more k ne's palaces than Egypt has had need of. The building of the Great Pyramid emp oyed ,00,000 slaves for 30 years,
Sh^g^eomerical perfection of it is a marvel to this day. Khufu, or Cheops, who built the Great Pyramid-probably
as his tlmb-reigneS about 4700 B.C., so that the pyramid is more than three times as old as the Roman Empire.
227
M^emowman
f^mr^tmm^mmi^mmmKsmmfmm
T
L.
fmsimi^0Lii^^ !- \4i^ti,»j..%-
-■^^^iifcji-'ii-.j-jiijiifttigii,, '^
ll|PMi«||Pt#iKan«MPM4Mn^|^^HV
^aww—»wp»agg»lMyiJLi Ji'!-"^ iij.!igaffw(pwi
-pB
THE MAUSOLEUM AT HALICARNASSUS
This famous monument of antiquity was erected in tlie year 354 B.C. to the memory of King: Mausolus of Caria
by Ills widow Artemisia, at Halicarnassus, the beautiful Greek city-colony on the shores of the iEgean Sea. Some
idea of its sizf; will be gathered from the fact that it was surrounded by an esplanade which measured over
three hundred feet on each side, while its total height was nearly a hundred and fifty le-'t. The statue existed almost
intact until the fourth century of our own era, and was finally destroyed in the Middle Ages by the Turks.
228
THE COLOSSUS O
This short-lived achievement of ancient ar' -' d rr- n al^
the sun-god raised in the island of Rhodp 'i v,'
it stood. Dedicated to Apollo, who wa
made from the engines of war which thr
An earthquake in 224 B.C. destroyed i'
POrv
vas t^
juld !■
largr of a hundred statues to
"MS the place where
I'cetes, it was
'inary statue.
•■ Rhodes.
229
THE TEMPLE OF DIANA AT EPHESUS
"Great is Diana of the Ephesians." Her temp, e was burned down in 356 B C , and subsequent to that year the great
temple famf-d in history was erected by tlie lunians. It is said to iiave taken 220 ypars to constiuct and measured
about 400 feet in length and 200 feet in width, while it contained no fewer tlian 127 Ionic columns nearly 65 feet high.
The temple was despoiled by Nero and destroyed by the Goths iu 262 A.D., but some of its ruins still remain.
230
THE STATUE OF JUPITER ON OLYMPUS
The world-fa^moiis statue of Jupiter was the work of the great sculptor Phidias It measured 43 feet in heie-ht above
the base, i he body of tne god was carved from ivory, and the drapery was of soHd g-old. No other statue
of such magnitude, of snch artistic perfection, or of such precious material, ha , b^en known to history Among-
the ruins of the temple are still to be seen the remains of the black marble mosaic on which the statue stooci
231
THE LIGHTHOUSE OF ALEXANDRIA
On the island of Pharos, close to Alexandria, stood the famous lighthouse erectoci by Ptolemy Philadelphus about 280 B.C.
Constructed of white marble, in a series of vast stages of vaulted masonry, it reached the height of 520 feet, and m its
summit burned ni^ht and day, an immense beacon fire of wood, which could be seen 30 miles at sea. The lighthouse was
gradually destroyed by earthquakes and the action of the sea, but existed in some condition to the end ol the 13th century.
232
S^TION
AND
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION
IN EGYPT
BY PROFESSOR FLINDERS PETRIE
TN looking back to the beginning of
A civilisation in any country, we have
to deal with the physical changes which
the land has undergone, and to con-
sider the conditions which promoted or
hindered the advance of its inhabitants.
The nature of a country largely rules
the nature of its people, both bodily
and mentally ; and it may even be true
that, if sufficient time be given, the same
character and structure will always be
produced by equal conditions.
From historical records, and the ceme-
teries that have been examined, it appears
that the beginning of a continuous civil-
isation in Egypt must be set as far back
as about 10,000 years ago, or
8000 B.C. The question then
Civilisation
10,000
Years ago
is, how far the condition of the
country at that age was similar
to that now seen ? The present state
is quite new, geographically speaking, as
the deposit of mud by the Nile, jn-ovid-
ing a suitable soil, is only a matter of a
few thousand years. The' accumulation of
deposit is about 5 in. in a century (47 at
Naukratis, 5-1 at Abusir, 5-5 at Cano) ;
and the depth of it is not less than 26 ft.,
and varies in different places down to
62 ft. The lower depths are, however,
often mixed with sand beds, and do not
show the continuous mud deposit ; hence
the average depth of 39 ft. is too large,
and if we" accept 35 ft., it will certamly
be a full estimate. At the average rate
of deposit, this would be formed in 6,000
years. But, on the other hand, the deposit
may have been slower at the beginning,
and hence the age would be earUer. Also,
the full depth may be greater, owing to
some borings hitting on ground which was
originally above the river. Hence the
extreme limits of age of Nile
How we deposit in different positions
can Fix ^^.^ perhaps 7,000 to 15,000
the Date ^^^^^^ ^^^ probably about
10,000 years may be a hkely age for the
beginning of continuous Nile mud strati-
fication. Hence it is clear that the start
of the civilisation was about contemporary
with the first cultivable ground.
Earlier than the Nile deposits there
must have been some rainfall, enough to
keep up the volume of the river, and to
prevent its slackening, so as to deposit
its burden. We must picture, then, the
country as having enough rainfall for a
scanty vegetation in the valleys, while
the Nile flowed down a mighty stream,
filling the whole bed as it now does in
flood, and bearing its mud out to the sea,
except in some backwaters which were
shoaling uj). Such a land would support
a small population of hunters, who
followed the desert game and snared
hippopotami in the marshes.
The Nile had been in course
of recession for a long period
before it began to rise again
by filling its bed. The gravels high
above the present Nile contain flints
flaked by human work ; much as in Sinai
such flakes are found, deep in the filling
of the valleys which belong to a pluvial
233
Stone
Age in
Egypt
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
The First
Dwellers in
the Land
period. Yet after the Nile had retreated
down to the present level, man appears
to have been still in the Palaeolithic stage,
as freshly flaked, unrolled flints have
been found at the lowest surface level of
the desert. As the country, while drying
up, and before mud deposits were laid
down, would have only been suited for
occupation by hunters, it seems
probable that Palaeohthic Man
had continued in Egypt until
the beginning of the Nile de-
posits— that is to say, till the beginning
of the continuous civilisation as dis-
covered in the cemeteries.
Bushman Type. On turning to the
remains of the earliest burials, we find
that in many cases female figures of the
Bushman — or more precisely Koranna —
type, were placed in the graves ; while at
the same time long, slender figures of the
European type are also found. The
inference is that the Palaeolithic race of
the Koranna type was known to the
earhest civilised race in Egypt, and that
they were being expelled and exterminated,
as only female figures are found — repre-
senting captive slave women — and even
these soon disappear. Thus it would
seem that Egypt, as an almost desert
region, before the formation of the cultiv-
able mud flats, was the last home on the
Mediterranean of the hunters who con-
tinued in the Palaeohthic stage. The
physical type of the figures which we can
attribute to this earliest population has
the Bushman characteristics of fatness
of the thighs and hips, with a deep
lumbar curve ; and a line of whisker
covers the jaws of the
female figures, akin to
the fur on the bodies
of women on the Bras-
sempouy and Lan-
gerie - Basse ivory
carvings. This indi-
cates that they be-
longed to a cold
climate, and had not
been developed in
Egypt. As, however,
had certainly
in the Nile
for long age-
this northern indica-
tion points to a com-
paratively recent
invasion from a colder
to a warmer climate.
man
dwelt
valley
THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF EGYPT
As female figures of the Bushman type are found in the
very earhest Egyptian graves, it is tliought that this
race was native to the country and was gradually
expelled by the first civilised people. The photograph
illustrates one of the figtires taken from a grave.
such as has been the rule throughout
historical times.
Prehistoric Period. The beginning
of the continuous civilisation of the
country must be placed at about 8000 B.C.
The written history extends back to the
first dynasty, and places that at 5500 B.C.,
and this is checked at the sixth, twelfth,
and eighteenth dynasties by records of
the rising of Sirius, and of the seasons in
the shifting year, which agree to this
dating in general. For the length of the
prehistoric age before these written records
there is no exact dating. But, as in a given
district of Egypt, where all the desert has
been searched, the prehistoric graves are
about as numerous as those made during
the six thousand years of the historic
time, at least 2,000 or 3,000 years must
be allowed. The amount of change in
every kind of production during this age
is considerable ; and as we can trace two
cycles of civilisation, which usually occupy
about 1,500 years each in the later times,
it is likely that 2,500 years is too little
rather than too long a period. As no
definite scale of years can be used, the
dating of the graves of this age is treated
as a matter of sequence. From
a careful statistical classing of
the pottery, it is practicable to
put about a thousand of the
fullest graves into their original order ;
this series is then divided into 50 equal
parts, and these are numbered from
30 to 80. Thus, sequence date 30 is the
earliest type of graves yet found, and
s.D. 80 is of the age of Mena, the founder
of the first dynasty. The sequence dates
are given below for
each stage of the pre-
historic times.
Earliest Burials.
The earliest graves
found are shallow cir-
cular hollows on the
desert, about 30 in.
across, and a foot
deep. The body lies
closely doubled up,
wrap[)ed in goat-skins.
There are very few
objects placed with
these burials; a
single cup of pottery,
red, with black top ;
rarely, a slate palette
for grinding face-
paint ; and, in one
Time
Without
Dates
234
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EGYPT
grave, a copper pin to fasten the goat-
skin. Pottery was in a simple stage, and
weaving was quite unknown. These graves
are classed as sequence date 30.
First Civilisation. The next period
is that of the white patterns on red (s.d. 31
to 34). This use of lines of raised white slip
is the same as on the present Kabjde
pottery, and the patterns are so closely
alike on the ancient and modern that this
forms a strong evidence for a Western
connection of the
people,
period
In
the
this
lines of the civili-
sation become
clearly marked
The fine flint chip
ping with delicate
serrated edges ; the
polished red pot-
POTTERY OF FIRST EGYPTIAN CIVILISATION
circular The pottery of the first period of Egyptian civilisation is character-
s.D. 40 and 44. These changes serve to
stamp the point of the change, but it is
in other respects that the differences
are most visible. The black-topped pottery,
red polished, and fancy forms of pottery
cease to develop after 43, whereas the
decorated pottery, with brown line patterns
on buff ware, is scarcely known till 40,
and the late class of pottery begins at 43.
In the stone vases the forms of tall tubular
shape, with handles, cease at 40, and the
barrel forms begin
at 39, and are
dominant by 42.
In flint work the
various new types
begin from 39 to
45 ; the disc mace
dies out about 40,
and the pear-
shaped mace be-
gins at 42. In the
tery, of . .
1 f f^^^^, ised by raised white Hnes on a red body, and from the fact that it ^i„j.„ ^^1^+ + ^r, ^1^
ana OI lancy closely resembles the pottery of the Kabyle people, who live in Slate paieiieS OIQ
forms ; the tall North Africa to-day it is thought the first Egyptian civilisation typCS Vauish and
' ^ ma V have rnme irom the wp.«:t_ Xhp<;e #»-yamnlp<= nr#i h#iforp"7nnr» R P '^ r
may have come from the west. These examples are before 7000 B.C
from
round- bottomed
stone vases ; the slate palettes for face-paint,
of animal forms and of rhombic shape ; the
use of sandals; the ivory combs with animal
figures ; the disc-shaped mace-head — all of
these were in use with the white cross-lined
pottery, and stamp the general type of
_ the beginning of the civilisa-
EmerTaTom *^°"- ^^ ^^^'^ ^^^°'^ ."^
^ ™Y/-"1^ *" "* a settled population, with
the Mists . f. /• , '
strong artistic taste in
handicraft, but not in copying Nature ;
with patience for very long and skilful
work, and probably organised, therefore,
under chiefs who commissioned such
labour ; yet with sufficient general demand
for fine things to have raised hand pottery
to its highest level ; with strong beliefs
about a future life, as shown by the uniform
detail of the position of the body and the
nature of the offerings in the grave ;
with the arts of spinning and weaving ;
fairly clothed, as shown by the use of
sandals ; fighters, with finely-made and
treasured weapons ; with the use of
personal marks for property — altogether
much in the stage which we now see in
the highest races of the Pacific or Central
Africa.
Eastern Invasion. This civilisation
had lasted for a few centuries when we
see a change come over it. On searching
the types of pottery we see many new
forms arising from s.d. 38 to 43, while
many older types disappear between
new ones arise
37 to 42. The same is seen in
ivories. Foreign intercourse was increased,
as silver (from Asia Minor ?), lazAili
(from Persia ?), serpentine and haematite
(from Sinai ?) all come into use from
38 to 40. In copying Nature, the steato-
pygous figures of the Bushman type
are only found before 38, and human
figure amulets are known from down to
44. Animal figure amulets begin in 45.
Multiple burials in graves are common
down to 40, and continue till 43 ; only
single burials are known later.
The racial changes that are thus in-
dicated by these widespread differences
can only be traced by the different pro-
ducts. The white hne pottery charac-
teristic of the earliest people is closely
like that of the Kabyles, and the simi-
larity of the skull measurements show that
there is no bar to accepting the con-
nection with the North African race.
But the details of the new people, using
animal amulets, a face veil, wavy-handled
pottery like that of early Pales-
tine, and the Asiatic silver
and lazuli, all point to their
coming in from the East. This
change may be further linked with the
religious traditions. This later myth-
ology taught that Osiris had found the
Egyptians in a brutal existence, and he
had taught them agriculture, laws, and
worship ; this appears to be the tradition
235
Invasion
from
the East
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
of the bringing in of cultivation by the
earhest civilisation at s.D. 30. His wor-
shippers were allied with those of Isis, who
were a kindred tribe. Hence Osiris is said
to have married his sister Isis. The myth
further shows that this civilisation was
attacked treacherously by the tribe who
worshipped Set, in confederacy with an
Ethiopian queen, and they suc-
-. * ceeded in suppressing the wor-
y o ogy gj^jp ^£ Osiris and removing
*^* his remains to Byblos in Syria.
This seems to agree to the influx of Asiatic
influence, about s.D. 40, which we have
noticed above. The correction of the calen-
dar from 360 to 365 days, is attributed to
the beginning of the civilisation (at s.D.
30) by the myth that Osiris and his cycle
of gods were born on the extra five days.
Second Civilisation. The second pre-
historic civilisation, of which we have
stone vases were wrought ; and that by
the form of the vase they were probably
the same people as the later prehistoric
stock. Yet, on the other hand, we occa-
sionally find pottery vases of that people
in the earlier prehistoric age, so that they
must have been in touch with Egypt
throughout. The more likely source for
them was the mountainous region, where
snow sometimes lies, between Egypt and
the Red Sea ; and certainly this was the
source of the rare igneous rocks used for
the prehistoric vases.
The general conclusion would be, then,
that a people occupying the mountainous
region east of Egypt had an independent
civilisation, and were in touch with the
early prehistoric people of the Nile valley.
Then about s.d. 38 they began to push
down into Egypt, and fully entered it
by s.D. 44, bringing with them various
i^^^A^AA4^AA^
PREHISTORIC SHIPS: THE EARLIEST PICTURES OF EGYPTIAN VESSELS
The pottery of the second period of Egryptian civilisation is rich in representations of prehistoric ships. The vessels
are shown with many oars, and the cabins are placed araidship with a gangway between. It is gathered from these
crude drawings that in prehistoric times there was a considerable shipping trade along the coast of Egypt.
traced the Asiatic source, is specially
marked by the use of a hard buff pottery,
on which designs are often painted in
l)rown outline. The art of these has no
connection with that of the early white
line designs; the habit of covering figures
with cross lines, and the imitation of
hasket-work, have entirely disap{)eared ;
and, on the contrary, the plant, ostrich,
and ship designs are quite new.
What, then, were the connections of
these peo})le ? One indication is gleaned
from carvings at the close of the i)re-
liistoric ;ige. Two trilnitaries of the new
king of I'-gvpt are shown bearing stone
vases of the style of those of the second
prehistoric civilisation, s.D. 45-75. They
have large pointed noses, and wear y)ig-
tails, and another tributary of the same
tyi^e wears a long robe. Hence we may see
that they came from a cold region where
236
different points of their own civilisation,
and expelling the Osiris worship in favour
of Set, who was their god. They probably
brought in the Semitic elements to the
Egyptian language, along with the other
Asiatic connections.
Shipping. Under this new order of
things we see much more foreign and mari-
time connection. The introduction of
silver from Asia, of lazuli from
Persia, of hctmatite from Sinai,
of serpentine from the Aral)ian
desert— all show this. On the
va.ses we .see the starfish jxiinted, and one
of the most usual decorations was the
figure of a great galley or ship. These
shijxs are shown with oars on the pottery
vases, and without oars or sails on the
tomb paintings. From the proportion of
the figures they appear to have been as
much as 50 ft. long, and this is confirmed
Fleet of
Prehistoric
Ships
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EGYPT
by the oars, which number up to sixty.
Neither indication is exact ; but the ten-
dency would be to exaggerate the size of
the figures, and certainly not to diminish
them, and so aggrandise the ship. The
shipbuilding in the early history may
prepare us for the earlier rise of such
work, when we read of Senefru building
sixty ships of a hundred feet long in one
year.
These prehistoric ships were all of one
pattern. Amidships were the large cabins,
and there was no poop or forecastle struc-
ture, probably because of the want of
support fore and aft, the flotation being
mainly in the middle. The two cabins
v/ere separated by a broad gangway across
the boat, and joined above the gangway
by a bridge from roof to roof. Lesser
cabins projected fore and aft from the
main cabins. On the roofs were rails at
the corners, so as to secure top cargo
without getting in the way of loading it up.
In a large ship there was an upper cabin
on the hinder main one, a light shelter
shaded with branches. From the back
of the hinder cabin stood up a tall pole
bearing a solid object as a
What the c;tandard, which we shall notice
Ships
Were Like
below. At the stern was the
steersman seated by an upright
post, to which was probably lashed the
steering oar, as in the historical boats. In
the bows was a low platform, with a rail
round it, for the look-out, shaded with
branches. The cabins were narrower than
the beam, and left free space for rowers
on each side.
Foreign Imports. Vessels of this large
size certainly imply a corresponding
importance of commerce. We have noted
already the foreign imports into Egypt ; and
others imply more distinctly a sea inter-
course. From s.D. 33 down to s.d. 68 there
is found black pottery with incised basket-
work patterns [page 238] filled in with
white. It is always rare, only occurring in
less than i per cent, of the graves, and in
only one case was there more than a solitary
example. It is entirely disconnected from
the Egyptian types, but it is closely akin
to pottery found on the north of the
Mediterranean, in Spain (Ciempozuelos),
in Bosnia, and in the earhest town of Troy.
At the close of the prehistoric age the
black pottery of the late Neohthic city of
Knossos is found in the lowest levels of
the temple at Abydos. And in the royal
tombs of the first dynasty there many
vases and pieces have been found which
are clearly of the earliest age of painted
iEgean pottery. Considering that the bulk
of the trade must have been for perish-
able goods — oil and skins from Crete and
Greece, corn and beans from Egypt —
it is not to be expected that a great
amount of breakable pottery would pass
and be preserved in burials.
Trade There are, moreover, some
m Those ^^jjj^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^ besides the
^^® northern pottery. Throughout
the later prehistoric age emery was regu-
larly in use for all the grinding and
polishing of stone vases and of carnelian
beads ; and so common that one excelsior
spirit in search of a tour de force had even
cut a vase out of block emery, as being the
hardest known material, this emery, so
far as we know, must have come from
Smyrna. Again, the gold of the first
dynasty contains a large amount of silver.
This points to its source from the Pactolus
region, where electrum was found, rather
than from Nubia, where the gold is free
from silver.
CONNFXTION OF THE SHIPPING. When
we look at the evidence of the ships them-
selves we see that it points to their having
been used at sea rather than on the Nile.
It is impossible to row a ship up against
the Nile stream, which runs at three miles
an hour, and sailing or towing is the only
way to go southward in Egypt. But in
only one instance is a ship with a sail repre-
sented, while there are many dozens of
figures of rowing vessels. The galley has
always been the type of business ship on
the Mediterranean. All through the clas-
sical wars the rowing galley was the main-
stay of power. The Homeric catalogue of
ships, the Phoenician coinage, the Assyrian
sculptures, the Greek fleets, the Cartha-
ginian navy and its destroyers of Rome,
the pirates of Liburnia and Lycia, down to
the Venetian fleet and the French galleys
of a couple of centuries ago, all show
the dominance of the oar.
l°^\ The nature of the standards
Ensigns ^^^^^^ ^^^^^ carried by the shii:»s
Carried ^^,^^ been variously interpreted.
We can distinguish the elephant, bird
on a crescent, and fish ; the two or
four pair of horns, the Ijush, and the
branch ; the rows of two, three, four, or
five hills ; the crossed arrows, and the
harpoon, besides other forms which we
cannot identify. The question is, what view
will account "for these most completely ?
237
ARTICLES ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE EARLY CIVILISATION OF EGYPT
(i) Slate palettes on which paint for rubbing round the eyes was ground ; (z) adze heads and harpoons, the
harpoons at the sides being of bone, the oth'-rs of copper; (3) beautifully flaked flint knife; (4) serpent amulet
of stone ; (5) maces of quartzose rock, very effective weapons ; (6) forked lances of flint ; (7) combs
of ivory ; (8) vases carved Irom hard stone ; (9) black incised pottery, a foreign import into early Egypt.
238
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EGYPT
Some have thought they were emblems
of gods, and that the boats were sacred
to divinities ; but there are many which
cannot be thus explained. Others have
thought that they indicated tribes ;
Imt the rarity of repetitions, and the
absence of any duplicates together, are
against this. Marks of personal ownership
have been suggested; and this is not
impossible, as they might be well dedicated
to special gods. But the prominence of
the groups of hills as signs agrees best with
their being marks of the ports from which
they hailed ; the divine emblems would
naturally be those of the god of the port,
the number of hills would be very likely to
distinguish different ports, the elephant,
the bush, or the fish might well be the mark
of a port. And the parallel in later times
of such being distinctive ensigns for ports
— as in the ensign of Gades found in the
Red Sea— agrees to this usage. The carry-
ing of a port ensign in an age of independent
city-states was equivalent to a national
flag in later times ;
and it was essential
for showing friends
or foes.
We have dwelt at
length on the detail
of this shipping, as
it is the most im-
portant subject for
showing the extent
and character of the
early civilisation. It
takes two to trade as
well as to quarrel ;
and these large ships
were not rowed about the Mediterranean
unless there was a paying trade to be done
on those coasts, a people civilised enough
to produce goods that were wanted and to
require foreign stuff in exchange, and a
society stable enough to enable goods to be
stocked in bulk and traded without any
serious risk of fraud or force.
Hunting. The main occupation repre-
sented in the prehistoric paintings is hunt-
ing. The bow and arrow was
used. The bow was a single
piece of wood, painted red and
covered with zigzag white lines ;
the arrow was of reed, with a point several
inches long of hard wood. The forked lance
of flint was also a favourite weapon [p. 238] ;
it was inserted at the end of a wooden
shaft, which was controlled by a long thong
of leather ending in alabaster knobs which
HTTrF
STANDARDS OF EGYPTIAN SHIPS
There has been much speculation as to the significance
of the standards carried by the most ar>rient of the
Egyptian vessels, as recorded on pcti-ery and else-
where. Some examples of these standards are here
given. The most reasonable supposition is that these
devices indicated the port from which the vessel sailed.
kept it from entirely flying trom the fingers.
Thus the lance could be thrown by a man
in ambush to cut the legs of a gazelle,
while, if it missed, it was jerked back
by the elastic thong, and so saved from
breaking the delicate edge of flint. These
forked lances are found throughout nearly
all the prehistoric time ; and they con-
tinued in use in North Africa
Mode of ^jj^ ^^g Roman Age, when Com-
modus borrowed thence their
Hunting ^gg ^^^ hunting the ostrich.
This lance retained by a thong was the
parallel to the favourite harpoon used
in fishing. Another mode of hunting was
the trap. This is represented as being
formed of pointed sphnts or stakes,
lashed together like spokes of a wheel,
with the points around a central hollow.
Such traps to catch the legs of animals
are used now in Africa, and an example
was found at the Ramesseum, dating
perhaps from the twentieth dynasty.
Sticks or clubs were used in hunting and
in fighting.
Fighting. The
earliest representa-
tion of fighting is on
a vase of the white
slip on red, at the
beginning of the pre-
historic age. On that
a man with long,
wavy hair appears to
be spearing another
man in the side.
Later, there are the
fighters on the Hiera-
konpolis tomb, at
this hooked sticks are
On
Ingenuity
of the
Hunters
about s.D. 63.
used, and the fighters are clad with a
spotted animal's hide on the back. One
man has been killed, and another is hard
pressed, fallen on one knee. To save him-
self from blows he has taken off the hide
and is holding it up, thus anticipating the
use of the shield. It seems likely that the
Egyptian shields of hide stretched on a
frame of sticks were directly copied
from this use of the hide that was other-
wise worn on the body. In another group
a black man is holding three red captives
bound with a black cord, while two red
men approach him to deliver their
kindred.
The weapons mostly found are the stone
maces [page 238]. ^ These were sharp-edged
discs in the earlier age, a form which is
very effective in a mixed fight, as it
239
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Fighting
with
Maces
cannot be turned aside like a battleaxe,
but must cut in whatever direction it
fails. These maces were usually made
of porphyry and other quartzose rocks.
The mace used in the later age was of a
pear shape, and this form was continued
into the historic times, and per-
}:)etuated in the conventional
scene of the king striking an
enemy, even in the latest times.
The handle holes in these maces are
very small, and this shows that prob-
ably the handles were dried thongs of
hide. Nothing else would be sufficiently
tough and elastic. The flint dagger was
probably also used, and certainly the
copper dagger. A very fine ex-
ample of this, dated to s.d. 55 or
60, is wrought with a quadran-
gular blade, giving the utmost
strength and lightness, a better
design than that of any daggers
of the historic times.
Tools. Tools of metal begin
with small, square chisels of cop})er
at S.D. 38. The intermediate
examples have not been found till
we reach a fine large chisel of
copper at the close of the pre-
historic. Adzes of copper [p. 238J
begin at s.D. 56, or earlier, and
increase in size down to historic
times ; they con-
tinued to be the
favourite tool of
the Egy})tians
for both wood
and stone work-
ing until (ireck
times. Borers
are usually
tapered, to work
in soft material.
Needles of cop-
per appear as
early as s.D. 48
and perfection of hand work. The Scandi-
navian flint chipping used to be regarded
as the most perfect, but the Egyptian
work entirely surpasses it in regularity
and boldness.
Stone Vases. Hard stones were largely
employed for making vases [page 238].
In the earlier age tall, cylindrical forms
were used, and in the later age barrel
forms. The earlier material was usually
basalt, but syenite, porphyry, alabaster
and limestone were also used. The later
materials included slate, grey limestone,
breccia, serpentine, and diorite. The
hollowing out of these vases was by
grinding, but the outside was entirely
_ formed by chipping and polishing
without rotary motion. The per-
fect regularity of the forms, and
the line taste shown in the curves
of the outlines, as well as the
hardness of the material, place
the vase working higher than any
work of the historic times.
Pottery. Pottery was greatly
developed, although the wheel was
not used, and all the forms were
entirely modelled by hand and
eye without mechanical guidance.
The outlines are true and fine, the
circularity is astonishingly regular,
although all the trimming and
polish runs verti-
cally ; and it was
as easy in such a
mode of building
to make oval,
doubled, or
square forms, all
of which are
THE FIRST PICTURES OF FIGHTING lOUna. i ne
The earliest representation of fighting, at the beginning of the ' J . .
prehistoric age, shows a man with long, wavy hair, spearing pottcry iS the
another man in the side. Later, are fighters on the Hierakonpolis Aarnr^^tfA with
tomb, using hooked sticks and clad in piebald hides of animals. ClCCOiaieu, Willi
brown - red lines
on a hard buff body. The forms are
clearly copied from those of the stone
vases ; and the patterns are derived from
the fossils and veins in the stone, or
from the cordage net in which the vases
were slung for carrying. Next
and the fastening pins
of copper begin with the very earliest
graves of s.d. 30.
Flint working was the greatest artistic
industry of the prehistoric age. The
surfaces were not merely reduced by hap-
hazard flaking, but the flints were ground
into form, and then reflaked in a mar-
vellously regular manner with uniform
parallel grooves [page 238]. The finishing
of the edges by deep serrations of the
fineness of forty to the inch, and the
chipping out of delicate armlets of flint,
show also the same astonishing skill
240
1. 000
Forms of
Pottery
appear aloes and other bushes,
and figures of ships, which
we have already noticed.
Kows of ostriches and of hills are also
favourite designs.
Other pottery of this ware, but not
decorated, has a curious type of pro-
jecting ledge, wavy up and down, for
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EGYPT
handles. Beginning at s.d. 40 as a globular
vessel, the type narrows to an upright
jar ; by s.d. 60 the handles dwindle,
becoming united around it as a wavy
band of pattern ; by s.d. 70 the jar at
last becomes a cylinder ; by s.d. 75 the
band becomes a mere line ; and then
after s.d. 80 — ^^in the first dynasty — the
jar dwindles to a rough tube like a thumb-
stall. The contents of such jars similarly
deteriorate. At first, perfumed ointment
was put in them, then it was covered with
a layer of mud to retain
the scent ; the mud in-
creased until it was
merely scented mud, then
only plain mud was used,
and lastly they were left
empty. Beside many other
forms of this hard
ware there was also
a long series of types
in a rough brown
pottery, which passed
on into the ordinary
pottery of the first
dynasty. As there
they only belong to the earlier age, sug-
gesting that the hair was worn shorter
in the second period. Decorated tusks
of ivory are also early ; they were fastened
on to leather work, probably to close the
openings of water skins. Ivory spoons
belong only to the second period, as like-
wise do the forehead pendants of shell.
Amulets of animal forms were fre-
quent in the second period. They are
generally cut in stone, carnelian, serpen-
tine, porphyry, and coloured limestones.
The forms are the bull's
head (which continued in
use into historic times),
the hawk, serpent [p. 238],
frog, fly, scorpion, claw,
vase, and spear head. The
meanings attached to
them are quite un-
known.
Games are found,
as shown by the ivory
draughtsmen, the
small balls or
marbles, the stone
gateway and nine-
PREHISTORIC POTTERY OF EGYPT
are over a thousand The later pottery of the prehistoric period is characterised pins [page 2421, the
,..,,, , ,. r , 1 • by brown-red lines on a hard buff body. The forms ;- ^r o -r i'
dmerent forms of this and decorations have been copied from earlier stone hgUrCS Of llOUS and
prehistoric pottery ^^^«^' ^"^ ^'°'^ *^« "«*^ '" ""^'"^^ t^^y ^^""^ ^^"'^'^- hares, and the throw-
A Constant
Personal
Possession
panics it
known, and their study has been the key to
the whole arrangement of that age, this
subject is a very wide one, which we have
barely noticed here.
Slate Palettes. A constant personal
possession was the slab of slate upon
which the green malachite or
red ochre was ground for colour-
ing around the eyes. Usually
a brown pebble crusher accom-
and the dead often have a
little leather bag of malachite in the
hands. These slate palettes begin with
a plain rhomb form, probably de-
rived from the natural cleavages of the
slate rock. Well-formed animal figures
were also carved as slate silhouettes ; the
deer, hippopotamus, and turtle are the
oldest, and the fish also comes into the
earlier age. The double bird type begins
with the second age, and all the types
continuously degrade by repeated copy-
ing until their original form is quite
indistinguishable at the close of the
prehistoric age [page 238].
Personal Objects. Ivory carving
is common, mainly for long combs
to fasten up the hair. These usually
have an animal on the top of them ; but
16
ing slips for obtaining a count as with dice.
Clothing. The clothing of men was,
at most, the kilt of linen, or an animal's
hide put over the body. Often only a
belt was worn, with three narrow strips
hanging down in front. A usual covering
was a belt with a sheath attached to it
to hold up the genitals. With the pleated
kilt was also worn a belt having apparently
a jackal tail hung behind. On some figures
there is merely a double rope round the
waist. These various forms may belong
to different peoples and periods ; but
there are hardly enough examples to
prove any distinctions, as the varying
circumstance of the figures, captive and
conquered, resting and working, rich
and poor, in heat and in cold, may easily
have led to the different dress that we
see. Women are represented
with 'a white linen petticoat
from the waist to the feet.
Leather was a favourite
material for clothing, as well as for bags.
It was painted withi patterns, and deco-
rated with beads, reminding us of the
North American work.
Decay of Civilisation. All of this
civilisation gradually decayed ; the
241
What
the People
Wore
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
pottery is seen becoming coarser, good
work dying out in rougher copying, new
types seldom appearing, cheaper and
poorer objects being more usual. There
is ground, however, for supposing that
at some time in this age there was a
central rule at Heliopolis. There are
many traditions of a principality there,
Tu r\tj which must certainly have
The Oldest been before the dynasties. The
^^'''^ sacred emblem preserved in
° ^^^ the temple was the shepherd's
crook, haq, which served for the title of
" prince " in all later times ; the other
sacred emblem was the whip, and these
two were the royal emblems of Osiris.
The title of the nome was " the princes'
territory," and this capital retained in
later ages the re]mtation of being the
centre of learning and theology. And on
the fragment of the early annals known
as the " Palermo Stone " there is shown
THE EARLIEST GAME OF NINEPINS
These ninepins, the gate to play through, and the
porphyry balls were all found in a child's grave.
a long row of kings of Lower Egypt
before the dynasties ; these cannot have
ruled at Memphis, as that was a new
foundation by Menes.
History in Mythology. Of the break-
up of this civilisation we may trace some
relation in the mythology. After Isis
had recovered the body of Osiris, and the
worship of the Osiris and Isis tribes had
revived again from the Semitic invasion
of Set worshippers. Set again
H.Story as attacked the Osiris worship,
M tholo " ''"'^ scattered the body of
y o ogy Q^-jj-jg jj^i^Q fourteen parts in
different places. This refers probably
to the distribution of parts of the body
to different districts, when it was cut
up in the funeral ceremonies, according
to prehistoric usage. These parts of
Osiris were kept at sixteen nomes in
Egypt in historic times, six in the Nile
valley and ten in the Delta, probably
the original nomes of the country. The
242
End of
Prehistoric
Times
civil discord implied in this persecution
must have weakened the land ; and then
came the attack by the hawk worshippers
from the south. In the legend of Horbe-
hudti, or Horus of Edfu, we read that
the crocodiles and hippopotami (animals
of Set), attacked him, and his servants,
armed with metal weapons, smote and
conquered them, slaying 381 before the
city of Edfu. Then the worshippers of
Horus allied themselves with the sun
worshippers, and " Horbehudti changed
his form into that of a winged sun disc,"
and " took with him Nekhebt the goddess
of the South and Uazet, the goddess of
the North, in the form of two serpents,
that they might destroy their enemies
in the bodily forms of crocodiles and
hippopotami." That is to say, the Horus,
Ra, and serpent goddess tribes were all
allied to attack the domination of the Set
tribe. They gradually drove them back,
and " Set went forth and cried out
horribly " ; he was finally struck down
at Pa-rehehu. " Thus did Horbehudti,
together with Horus, the son of
Isis, who had made his form like
unto that of Horbehudti." That
is to say, the rest of the Horus
worshippers joined the Horus-Ra party.
The final battle and expulsion of Set
was at Zaru on the eastern frontier of
Egypt. This, in mythological form, seems
to give the history of the driving out of
the Semitic population of the later pre-
historic age, by the dynastic race descend-
ing from Upper Egypt, at the close of
the prehistoric period. An actual result
of this war, all through later times, was
the multitude of towns named Samhud,
or " United to Behudti," marking the
allies of the Horus party.
Historical Slate Palettes. Of the
period of the conquest by the dynastic
races, which closed the prehistoric age,
there is an invaluable series of monu-
ments carved on slate. These carved slates
are the elaborated outcome of the slate
palettes used for grinding the face paints
throughout the prehistoric age. A similar
elaboration of a simple article is familiar
in modern times in the snuff-box. A
plain receptacle of bone or wood was
decorated, ])lated, made of silver and
of gold, inlaid with diamonds and
painted with the costliest miniatures, and
yet — it was but a snuff-box. So the j)lain
slip of slate was carved into animal out-
lines, had animals scratched on it, then
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EGYPT
signs in relief upon it, and at last was
covered with the most elaborate carvings,
and yet — it was but a paint grinder,
and had always the pan for colour carved
on it, exactly of the shape of the pans on
the painters' palettes of that age. Every
stage can be shown, from a formless slate to
an artistic scene in relief. There are many
stages to be seen in the artistic development.
A. In the prehistoric age arc the scratched
outlines.
B. The well-incised elephant is as early as
s.D. 33-41 ; and with it are those signs in
low relief.
C. The high relief sign is of s.D. 60-63.
D. On the boat slate, the drawing is much
more detailed than on the boats of the
Hierakonpolis tomb of s.D. 63. We can
hardly separate this from the work of the
artistic new-comers, and it may well be
about s.D. 70-75.
E. The animal slate seems to be next, as
the treatment of the lion's hair is unlike the
following.
F. The four-dog slate, being a coarser but
more elaborated design of the same type,
may well be next.
G. The hut slate shows for the first time
the arrangement of lion's mane as on the
* ivory lions of King Zer.
H. The gazelle slate shows the same treat-
ment more advanced.
J. The towns slate shows the wiry detail
of muscles, beginning to appear in archaic
manner.
K. The bull slate has the same style
carried out fully and finely.
L. The Narmer slate has a less forcible and
smoother treatment of the bull, and brings
us down to touch with the historic times.
The figures can be seen in Capart's
" Primitive Art in Egypt," where they
may be identified by these letters, corre-
sponding to the paragraphs above : A, B,
figures 61, 62 ; C, 63 ; D, 169 ; E, 171-2 ;
F, 173-4 ; G, 170 ; H, 177-80 ; J, 175-6 ;
K, 181-2; L, 183-4.
Racial Types. These slate carvings
not only show the art of the time, but they
present the different races and the details
of their Ufe, more fully than we find them
for many centuries later. We see six differ-
ent types of physiognomy in the early
remains, and learn how complex the racial
history must be at the most remote period
accessible to us.
A. The acjuiline type is that of the principal
prehistoric race, closely like the Libyan on
the west and the Amorite on the east.
When mixed with negro it produced the exact
type of a European-Negro mulatto. Prob-
ably equal to the Libyan. [See Heads i to
4 on next page.]
f4 EP I T £ ff f?A rv
£ A N -:- SEA
EGYPT IN THREE PERIODS OF ITS
CIVILISATION
This map of Egypt shows Eg-ypt in three of its early
periods, (i) The earliest centres of culture were at the
places where parts of Osiris were preserved in the
prehistoric age, here named. (2) The second period is
shown by other centres being placed in the right geo-
graphical order, all here numbered I to XIX, following
down each branch of the Nile. (31 The third period is
when other centres were inserted in the lists in the
wrong order, here numbered 8 to 20. These three
stages of Egypt's history are all before the monarchy.
243
THE EARLIEST PORTRAITS OF VARIOUS RACES IN EGYPT
Numbers i and z are the aquiline type, similar to 3, the Libyan, and 4 the Amorite. s is the curly hair
type, 6 the sharp-nosed type, 7 the short-nosed type, 8 the forward beard type, 9-11 the straight-faced
type of dynastic conquerors. 12 is King Khafra of the Pyramid age, reverting to the original type of i and z.
B. The sharp-nosed type, firstly, with the
hair in a pigtail, bringing stone vases as
tribute, and sometimes dressed in long robe ;
secondly, with bushy hair and armed with
spear, throw-stick, mace, bow and arrows.
Probably the Arabian mountain race mixed
with Libyan. See figure 6 on this page.
C. The curly hair type, with plaited beard,
conquered and destroyed by type B. Prob-
ably from North Syria, by sculptures there.
See figure 5 on this page.
D. The forward beard type, with close-cut
hair ; much like the figures on early Nau-
kratite vases. Probably a coast people of
Libyan connection. See figure 8 on this page.
E. The short-nosed tvpe, a variety of D,
apparently belonging to the Fayum. Fig. 7.
F. The straight-faced type of the dynastic
conquerors. See figures g-ii on this page.
All of these different people.s were in
continual mixture and struggle during
the few centuries before the first
dynasty. Looking to the tribal hints
244
given by the mythology
able that :
it seems prob-
A represents the early Osiris and Isis
worshippers ; B the first dominance of Set ;
C the second irruption of Set ; D and E the
allied Osiris and Isis worshippers of the
Delta and coast who helped to expel Set ;
and F the hawk Horus worshipjiers, who took
the lead in driving out B and C by alliance
with A, D and E.
Dynastic Race. The most essential
difference between the prehistoric and the
dynastic people is in their artistic capacity.
The earlier peoples, though highly skilled
in mechanical detail and handling, were
yet very crude in their copying of any
natural forms. But as soon as we reach
the dynastic race we find that there is an
artistic .sense and power in their work, which
puts even the roughest of it far above all
that had gone before. The earliest examples
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EGYPT
of their sculpture appear to be the
colossal figures of the god Min, found at
Koptos. These are of the most primitive
style possible, the limbs scarcely marked
off from the trunk, and no details of form
attem])ted. But on the side of each there
is a patch of hammer-work outlining
some figures, perhaps a copy of embroi-
deries on a skin pouch hung at the side.
These are figures of a deer's head and
pteroceras shells on one, svvordfish,
shells, and standards of the god on an-
other, and the same objects, together with
an ostrich, elephant, hyaena, and calf on
the third. All are but roughly hammered
round, yet the spirit and correct forms
of the animals are of an entirely different
order from anything that had yet appeared
in Egypt. The promise of all the artistic
triumphs of thousands of
years to come is clearly seen
in these decorations of the
rudest statues known.
The source of this dynastic race can
only be inferred. Though marked off
from the earlier inhabitants by their
artistic taste, and by their use of
hieroglyphic writing, we know so very
little of the early history of any other
Mystery
of Dynastic
Race
Earliest
Promise of
Greatness
lands near Egypt that we cannot yet
trace any link to their original source. On
looking in various directions, it seems at
least clear that they do not belong to the
southern tribes, to which they have no
resemblance ; nor can we suppose that the
Libyans, who appear to be one
with the prehistoric people,
would also supply a race so
different in face and in habits.
The north and Syria seem barred by the
earliest centres being at Abydos and
Hierakonpolis in the south of Egypt, from
which they conquered the north.
Lastly, no source seems open except the
East, the road from which joined the Nile
at Koptos. It is there that the earliest
statues have been found, and the decora-
tion on those comprises the swordfish and
pteroceras shell belonging to the Red Sea.
Such seems to have been the road of the
dynastic race into Egypt ; but the
origin of that race yet awaits research.
There are undoubtedly some Babylonian
elements in their culture, and somewhere
at the south end of the Red Sea lay Punt —
the " divine land " of the Egyptians.
Thus we are tempted to look to some
migration from Southern Arabia, whence
THE FIRST PROMISE OF THE ARTISTIC TRIUMPHS OF EGYPT
These animal figures were wrought by hammering around on the surface of the colossal statue of the god Min,
found at Koptos, and show the beginning of the wonderful art of Ancient Egypt. It is the work of the earliest
dynastic people, who have passed beyond the stage of making rude scratches on walls and on pottery, and
have arrived, as the figures of the ox and the hyaena prove, at a real conception of the methods of sculpture.
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
also may have proceeded the kindred
Sumerian culture, a few centuries later.
From this centre in Pun, or Punt, it may
have conquered and colonised Egypt, and
then later passed on up the Red Sea
to the coast of the Poeni and their later
Punic colony — Phoenicia and Carthage.
Such is a pleasing co-ordination, but
Tk \iA k whether we shall ever recover
Con Tenors *^^ evidence to prove or
onqucrors (jjc^prove it hangs upon the
chance of the past and the
activity of the future.
Conquest of Egypt. The conquest of
Egypt spread down from the south to the
north. The earliest centres were Abydos
and Hierakonpolis. Probably Edfu was
as important, or more so ; but the great
Ptolemaic temple there being still com-
plete, the remains of the earliest kingdom
are sealed beneath its pavements. The
conquest must have been a gradual pro-
cess ; it is described as such in the myth,
many times and in many successive places
was Set defeated and repelled. And the
probability is that tribal war of such a
kind would only gradually transfer district
after district from one holder to the next.
We know how in England the conquest
occupied three centuries, from the Saxon
landing to the first Saxon king of all the
land. So it may well have been in
Egypt-
We read in Manetho of ten kings of
Thinis (Abydos) who ruled for 350 years
before the first dynasty of kings of all
Egypt. And we know, from the fragment of
the Palermo Stone, that at least thirteen
kings of Lower Egypt were recorded before
the first dynasty. It is obvious from this,
and from the probabilities of the conquest,
that there were Kings of Upper Egypt
before the first dynasty ; and there is no
reason for not accepting this statement of
Manetho as being equally correct with his
account of the first dynasty, which we can
verify. Of the actual course of the con-
„. quest, one fragment of carved
g'j slate has preserved the record.
Histo Seven towns are represented
upon it, each attacked by one
animal of the standards of the allies.
These towns may be tolerably identified
by comparing the hieroglyphics placed
within them with the names known in
historic times. The upper row of four
towns seem to be Mem in the Fayum,
Hipponon, Pa-rehehui, and possibly
Abydos ; and the lower three towns were
246
probably in the delta, though there are
the uncertainties of two northern similar
names.
Dynasty O. The contemporary remains
that appear to belong to this age of the
Rings of Abydos (which we may call
Dynasty O) are the tomb chambers and
funeral objects in the royal cemetery at
Abydos. The plan of that cemetery
shows a sequence of each later tomb
being placed next to the previous tomb,
and generally a receding further back into
the desert as time went on. Now, in
front of the tomb of Zer, the second king
of the first dynasty, there are three large
tombs alike, and four lesser ones. As
objects of Mena, the first king, were found
here, the other tombs are presumably
those of six kings before the first dynasty,
by their position. The actual objects found
in these tombs are all of a more archaic
style than those of ]\Iena or any later king.
The tombs themselves are all lesser and
simpler than those of Zer and later kings.
And the names of kings found here are all
without the vulture and urseus title, but
with only neb neb, the double lordship of
■ Egypt. The whole of the evi-
/*^f^ dence, therefore, goes to show
of Unknown ,1 . 1 • . 1 r
„. that we have six tombs of
'"^^^ the Thinite kings before Menes.
The names of these earlier kings, so far
as we trace them, are Ka, Ro, Zeser, Zar,
Nar, and Sma. Of these, Nar, or Narmer,
has the most important remains — part
of an ebony tablet, and an alabaster
jar from his tomb, and the great slate
palette, a great mace head, with scene
of a festival, and an ivory cylinder,
from Hierakonpolis. The next in im-
portance is Zar, or the " Scorpion
King," of whom there is a great carved
mace head, and also some vases. The
objects of the carvings appear to be
celebrations of the sed festival ; this
appears originally to have been the slaying
of the king every thirty years, making
him Osiris, one with the god, while his
daughter was married to the new king.
By the time of these carvings, it appears
that the king took the place of Osiris in
the ceremonials, and his successor mas-
queraded as the new king, and was hence-
forth the crown prince — the heir to the
kingdom.
There were brought to the festival of
Narmer 120,000 captives, 400,000 oxen,
1,422,000 goats ; and the system of
numeration was as complete before Menes
A FESTIVAL SCENE OVER 7,000 YEARS AGO, IN THE REIGN OF KING NARMER, 5,500 B.C.
... . . , % f ji _ /- __i J i.__ «r i_:„^^ ^f oil
A record of the festival of Narmer, a king of Abydos who reigned before the first dynasty of km&s of all
Egypt. It indicates that when the festival of his own death was celebrated in accordance with the ancient
custom of killing the king every thirty years to make him one with Osins the god, no f^^^"; tha" i^o ooo capt v^^^
400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats were offered. The numerical system is here seen to be complete up to milUons.
and
Building
as it was in any later time. The other
mace head of King Zar shows part of the
festival, and also the ceremony of the
king hoeing the bank of a canal, probably
at the inundation. We see the reclama-
tion of the land, with men busy embanking
the canals, and cultivating a
Planting pQ\ra tree in an enclosure of
reeds, while they lived in reed
huts with plaited dome tops,
and used boats with a very high, upright
stem. The carved slate palette of Narmer
shows him grasping the chief of the Fayum,
prepared to smite him, a scene which was
repeated for five thousand years in all the
Egyptian triumphs. The metal water-
pot and sandals are carried behind the
king by his body servant. On the other
side of the palette is the king going to a
triumphal ceremony, preceded by the
scribe, thet, and four men of different
types bearing the standards of the army,
possibly connected with the four terri-
torial divisions of the army found under
Ramessu II. Before them lie ten slain
enemies, with their heads cut off and put
between their legs. The carving of the
detail, and particularly the muscular
anatomy of the king's figure, is extra-
ordinarily fine and firm, and as true as
any work of later time.
Written History. Having now dealt
with the history as drawn from the
remains which have come to light, we now
enter from this point on the continuous
written history, which has come down
from hand to hand without a break
to our own times, during over seven
thousand years. This history was com-
piled by the high- priest and scribe Manetho
of Sebennytos in the Delta, and only a
fragment of his work has been preserved
on its full scale ; but three later writers
have given epitomes of it, and it is on their
lists that we have to depend. These are
Julius Africanus (221 a.d.), Eusebius (326
A.D.), and George the Syncellus (792 a.d.).
Unfortunately, much confusion has been
caused by scholars not being content to
accept Manetho as being
The Men Who s^ibstantially correct in the
Handed Down ^^^-^^ though with many
the Story small corruptions and errors.
Nearly every historian has made large
and arbitrary assumptions and changes,
with a view to reducing the length of
time stated. But recent discoveries seem
to prove that we must accept the lists as
247
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
An Ancient
Historian and
His Figures
having been correct, however they may
have suffered in detail. A favourite
supposition has been that the dynasties
named were arbitrary divisions of later
times ; but the earlier lists also show such
divisions as far back as the eighteenth
dynasty, and kings founding
a d3masty used to copy the
titles of the founder of the
previous dynasty, showing
that the change was recognised at the time.
Another idea has been that the dynasties
were contemporary. But, on the contrary,
in the overlapping of the tenth and
eleventh and also the twenty-fifth and
twenty-sixth dynasties, we can trace that
Manetho was very careful to cut off from
one dynasty all the time which he allows
to another. As regards the general
character of the whole length of time, we
can show that Manetho's version in 271 B.C.
at Sebennytos was the same as that given
to Herodotus two hundred years earlier at
Memphis. Herodotus was told that from
Menes to his time were 330 kings, and
the totals of Manetho are 192 4-96 -1-50
to Artaxerxes -^ 338, so that, in spite of
corrujition in de-
tail, the totals
seem to have
been correctly
maintained.
In earlier times
we can compare
Manetho with the
fragments of the
Turin papyrus,
written in the
eighteenth d y -
nasty ; and here,
in one of the
most disputable
points — the kings
of the thirteenth
dynasty — the
average of eleven
reigns legible in
the papyrus is
(ih years, and
Manetho states
sixty kings in 453
years, or 7 i years'
average. The
general character
of a great number of short reigns in this age
IS quite su])ported. Then in the eighteenth
dynasty there is a rising of Sirius in the
movable calendar, in the twelfth dynasty
another rising of Sirius, and some seasonal
248
THE EARLIEST DETAILED SCULPTURE
This carved slate palette of King Narmer shows him grasping the
chief of the Fayuni, prepared to smite him, a scene which was
repeated for five thousand years in all the Egyptian triumphs.
The sculpture shows anatomical treatment for the first time in art.
dates, and in the sixth dynasty are two
seasonal dates. [Owing to the ignoring of
leap year, the Egyptian months shifted
round the seasons in 1,4(50 years ; hence any
seasonal date can only recur once in 1,460
years, and fixes an absolute date in that
cycle.] All of these agree with Manetho ;
and though the seasonal dates are vague,
they at least show that there is not an
error of several centuries in the total. In
the earliest times there is the account of
the first dynasty, the names and succession
of which are verified by the sculptured
lists in the nineteenth dynasty and by
the actual graves of the kings. Every
accurate test that we can apply shows
the general trustworthiness of Manetho,
apart from minor corruptions.
. It is naturally a question
a eria or ^j^g^^ ^^^^ q{ material existed
r'^,°'^i..° for an accurate historv of the
Early Times , , ■ t-, r " ^ r
early times. 1 he fragment 01
annals known as the Palermo Stone was
engraved in the fifth dynasty, and it
recorded the principal events of all the
years back to the beginning of the king-
dom, a thousand years before, the height of
the Nile for every
year, the length
of every king's
reign and of in-
terregnum to the
exact days. With
such a record of
the most remote
times carefully
maintained we
have every
reason to sup-
pose that the
high-priests and
sacred scribes
had adequate in-
formation as to
the genera]
course of their
history. And we
can see by the
Turin papyrus
how in the
eighteenth dy-
nasty there was
a full historical
list of all the
kings, with their length of reigns, dynasties,
and summations of numbers and years at
each of the large divisions. Thus it is
proved that there were historians at
various periods who compiled and edited
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EGYPT
o
■rt
n
IM
III!
11 II
rii5
II
H
A RECORD OF EVENTS IN 4750 B.C.
A part of early annals known as the Palermo Stone.
Each compartment contains the events of one year, with
the height of the Nile in cubits stated below it. The
lower right division records : " Building of a ship 170 feet
long, and of 60 ships 100 feet long. Conquest of negroes,
bringing 4,ock> men, 3,000 women, and 200,000 cattle.
Building a wall of the palaces of King Sneferu. Bring-
ing 40 ships of cedar (from Syria)." The left division
reads : " Making 35 hunting lodges and 122 tanks for
cattle. Building a ship of cedar 170 feet long, and
two other ships of 170 feet. 7th census of cattle."
the history, and so provided a soHd ground-
work for later writers, such as Manetho.
The materials that we have for studying
the civilisation of the early dynasties are
the royal tombs and steles, the
E / ^ *^ tablets of the annals, the seal-
C'v'r'^ V ^'^S^ ^^ ofificials, the inscribed
stone bowls, glazed pottery,
ivory, and wood, the rock steles of Sinai,
fragments of buildings of the second
dynasty and onward, the steles of private
persons and their graves.
Royal Tombs. The tombs show that
brickwork was familiar on a large scale.
The prehistoric houses and tomb chambers
were by no means slight. The town at
Naqada has house- walls about two feet
thick, and a town wall nearly eight feet
thick. The brick-lined tombs are some-
times as large as 8 ft. by 12 ft. The kings'
tombs of Dynasty O are about 10 ft. by
20 ft. Those of Narmer, Sma, and Mena
are about 17 ft. by 26 ft., with walls 5 ft.
to 7 ft. thick. Under Zer there is a great
extension ; the brick pit is 39 ft. by 43 ft. ;
it contained a wooden chamber 28 ft. by
34 ft., and it was surrounded by many
rows of graves — 318 in all. The later
tombs of the first dynasty are less . im-
In the
Kings'
Tombs
posing. At the end of the second dynasty
the tomb of Khasekhemui consisted of
fifty-eight chambers covering a ground
223 ft. long and 40 ft. wide. The sizes of
bricks were between 9 in, and 10 in. long,
half as wide, and under 3 in. thick, in
the prehistoric and through
the first and second dynasties.
Wood was used on a large
scale. The royal tombs show
beams for framing of about 10 in. wide
and 7 in. deep, and 18 ft. or 20 ft. long,
and these beams supported chamber sides
and floors formed of planks 2 in. or 3 in.
thick. The roof was made of similar
beams, covered with boards and mats,
which sustained 3 ft. or 4 ft. of sand
laid over the tomb. Such was an
extension of the roofs of poles and
brushwood which were laid over the
prehistoric tombs, and over the lesser
tombs of the officials of the early kings.
The sign for royal architect in the earliest
inscriptions is that of a carpenter, the
" two-axe man."
The stone steles were of limestone in the
first dynasty, and in the end of the
first dynasty the steles of Oa are of
black quartzose stone. Those of Perabsen
in the second dynasty are of very tough
syenite. The carving of all these is in high
relief, finely and boldly cut in a simple,
clear style. At the end of the second
dynasty a stone-built chamber appears for
the first time ; the blocks have naturally
cloven surfaces so far as possible, and the
rest of the faces are dressed with a flint
adze. Of the same reign of Khasekhemui
there is a granite door- jamb with signs in
high relief. Granite had already been
wrought flat for pavements in the previous
dynasty, at the tomb of Den.
Tablets of Annals. The greater part
of the inscriptions of this age are on small
square tablets of el)ony and of ivory, which
were found in the royal tombs. These
each have a hole in the top corner, and the
sign of a year — the palm stick
gyp s — down the side, as there is by
P . the side of the entries of the
events of each year on the early
annals. They thus appear to be each the
record of a year, and to have been strung
together by the corner holes. There has
not yet been any authoritative study of
the meaning of these earliest inscriptions,
which are very difficult to understand,
owing to the transitory condition of ideo-
graphs having not yet yielded to syllabic
249
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
usage. ■ We can, however, glean many
]:)oints about the civiUsation from them.
The towns were fortified with battlemented
walls. The shrines were small sanctuaries,
with a large court in front, like the temple
_,. „ courts of later times. At the
1 he Honour , j. j.i_ j. ^
. „. entrance to the court were two
Di^d foT^ ^^^^ P°^^^' apparently with flags,
which later developed into the
row of masts with streamers in front of the
pylon. The great festival at the close of
each thirty years was one of the most
important, already noticed here under
Narmer. The sanctuary for it had two
shrines back to back, each with a flight of
steps, apparently for Upper and Lower
Egypt. The dancing of the new king, or
the crown prince as king, before the old
Osirified king in the shrine, was one of the
main events of the feast. The types of
temple furniture were already fixed in the
forms which lasted for several thousand
years ; the barks of Harakhti are shown
with the same hangings at the prow, and
are double — for the E. and Wv— as in the
temple of Sety I. Large bowls of electrum
were offered in the temples by the king.
Wild cattle were hunted by trap nets,
as was done much later in Greece. And
there is shown a long road, with rest-
houses and palm-trees, leading up to the
great temple in the reign of King Zer.
Sealings. The clay sealings of officials
show much of the organisation of the
country. The oldest titles, under Zer,
are the " Commander of the Inundation "
and " Commander of the Cattle." In
the reign of Zet we find a " Commander
of the Elders " and " Archon," or chief
of the city ; also the temple property,
or " Inheritance of the Chief God," is
named. Under Merneit and Den there is
a prince (ha). The vizier was " Commander
of the Centre," probably the major do mo
of the Court, and also " Over-head of the
Commanders." There are further
named a " Royal Sealer of the
Vat of Neit," the " winepress of
the north," and a " Deputy of
the Treasury." In later reigns there is an
" Over-head " of a city. And under the
second dynasty the titles are "Royal Sealer
of all Deeds," " Scribe of Accounts of Pro-
visions," " Sealer of Northern Tribute,"
Officers
of the
Empire
A RECORD OF A YEARS EVENTS : EBONY TABLET OF KING MENA, 5500 B.C.
The greater part of the inscriptions of the first dynasty are on small square tablets of ebony and of ivory. These each
have a hole in the top corner, and the sign of a year -the palm stick— dowrn the side. They thus appear to be each
the record of a year, and to have been strung together by the corner holes. They were found scattered in the tombs,
250
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EGYPT
"Collector of
Lotus Seed," and
" Chief Man Under
the King." These
titles are from but
a very small part
of the bureau-
cracy, only those
whose seals were
affixed to the royal
provision w h i c h
was placed in the
tomb ; but they
suffice to show the
regular organisa-
tion of the govern-
ment at that age.
Stone Vases.
The stone vases for
the royal palaces
were cut in many
kinds of hard rock.
The rarer kinds are
rock crystal, ser-
pentine, and
basalt ; limestones,
porphyry and syenite were more usual ;
and the commonest materials were meta-
morphic rocks formed from volcanic ash
verging into slate, dolomite, marble, and
alabaster. These materials were mostly
selected for their beauty. The red por-
phyry is the rarest, being only known
in a bowl of the time of Mena, and two
prehistoric pieces. Black porphyry with
very large detached white crystals belongs
TOMBS OF KING ZER OF THE FIRST DYNASTY, 5400 B.C.
Brickwork was common in the houses and tomb-chambers of the prehistoric period,
and in the time of the kings of Abydos the building of the tombs was greatly
extended Here are seen the brick partitions to contam offenngs, around a wooden
chamber now destroyed. Beyond this all round were 318 graves of the royal servants.
working of the inside was always done by
grinding with blocks, sometimes having first
removed the axis by a tube drill hole. The
outside was dressed by chipping, hammer-
dressing, and hand polishing ; sometimes
done by circular motion on a block, but
often by crossing work by hand. The
readiness with which oval forms were
made shows how little depended on
circular motion.
The use of glazing had been already
invented early in the prehistoric age, as far
back as s.d. 31 ; but it was only applied
to beads and small amulets. The earliest
glazed pottery vase known is of
Mena, and this has his name
in violet glaze inlaid in the
green glazed body. Glazed
vases continued to be made throughout
the first and second dynasties, but became
rarer, and they have not been found
revived till much later times. But ivory
and wood were largely used for carved
objects, sometimes of elaborate design.
One of the most distinguishing points of
the age of the early kings was the minute
carving in imitation of leafage and basket-
work, which was mainly done in slate,
but also in wood. The fragments which
remain show most elaborate patterns
worked out with minute attention to
detail. Nothing of the same kind is
known in any other age.
Two-
Colour
Glazing
THE SEAL OF AN EGYPTIAN OFFICIAL
Much exact knowledge of the life of ancient Egypt
is derived from the clay seals of high officials. The
oldest known titles are those of " Commander of the
Inundation." The seal here is that of the " Southern
Sealer of all Documents of King Sekhem-ab," 5100 B.C.
only to the age of Mena. Pink granite,
blue-grey volcanic ash, the quartz crystal,
and the pink limestones are all very
beautiful materials. The hardness does
not seem to have been aught but an
attraction, as the finest work is always put
on the best materials ; whereas the soft
alabaster and slate did not seem to
challenge any great amount of care. The
251
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
the Pyramid
Builders
Monuments, There are but few monu-
mental remains from these early dynasties.
The great rock-cut scene of Semerkhet
conquering a Bedawy chief in Sinai is
the main example. The figures are only
. summarily cut in the natural
Remains ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ sandstone : but the
ScuMull" ^™^^ °^ ^^^ °"^^^"^ '^^ ^^^^^^
cu p ure ^j^^j^ jjQ g^j^y q{ ^i^g jnore pre-
tentious work of later times in that
region. The scene of Sanekht — early
third dynasty — is much poorer, and that
of his successor, Zeser, is scarcely legible,
the work is so rude and slight. The private
tablets which were put over the graves
around the royal tombs show that the
fine work was limited to a small number
of royal artists in the first dynasty, and
that there was no general school of able
men such as arose in later times. The
figures and hieroglyphics are rudely
hammered out, and the
drawing is but clumsy.
There is seldom more
than just the name of
the deceased. By the
time of Den many are
distinguished as the
Akhn-ka, the " glorious
soul" ; while there is also
a class apparently named
" people of King Setui,
daughter of the captive "
— i.e., slaves born of cap-
tives taken in his wars.
It appears that the use
of fine materials was at
its height under Mena
and Zer. Zer has the
largest and best - built
tomb, Zet shows the
greatest delicacy in work,
and Den seems to have
had the most showy ob-
jects. The changes in
about five generations
here were much like those
in an equal time from
Amenhotep I to III. m ^he earliest sculpture . ,. ., ,
tne eighteenth dynasty. There are but few monumental remains from individualism
Then decay markedly set the early dynasties. The great rock-cut highest plane of ab-
•„ „ 1 ,1 "^ scene of Semerkhet, of which this shows a " . ^
in, ana there was no re- part, is the main example. The figures are StraCtlOU.
vival until the Pyramid 3°a"n^dsTor;"bi;t^?L'VrSth"of^'hl'ruufiets Under the twelfth dy-
Kings. But some develop- better than in any of the more pretentious nasty the personality is
ment in the use of """'^ °^ ^^'^' ^'"^^^ '" *^« ^^""^ '^^'°"- weaker and the style
materials went on ; and Zeser, of the third that of a formal school, highly trained
dynasty, is .said to have built a stone palace; but dependent upon training. In the
while Khasekhemui, a generation earlier, eighteenth dynasty the vivacity of expres-
had a limestone chamber for his tomb, sion is directed to a purely personal appeal,
252
and carved granite for the door- jambs
of his temple, at about 4950 B.C. These
instances are the earliest use of stone
for construction that are yet known ;
though as early as the middle of the first
dynasty King Den had a pavement of
red granite in part of his tomb.
Pyramid Building. We now approach
to the well-known age of the pyramid
builders, when the civilisation appears
at its highest development in most
respects. We shall not deal with this
in detail, as it falls into the
^* ° ordinary historical period
which appears elsewhere in this
work [see Egypt] . But it may
be useful to give the most essential
facts of the material civili.'^ation, which
may otherwise be lost sight of in the
mass of the history.
In stonework the accuracy reached its
highest point in the fourth
dynasty, when the Pyra-
mid of Khufu was con-
structed with an average
error of less than i in
15,000 of length, and even
less in angle. The later
work fell off from this
accuracy ; but in the
twelfth dynasty the
granite sarcophagus of
Senusert II. was wrought
with an average error in
straightness and parallel-
ism of under seven -
thousandths of an inch,
and an error of propor-
tions between different
parts of less than three-
hundredths of an inch.
There was no attempt to
reach this high degree of
accuracy in the later
work. In sculpture the
main character of the
work of the Pyramid
kings is its dignity and
grandeur, representing
on the
THE BUILDING OF THE PYRAMIDS IN THE ZENITH OF EGYPTIAN CIVILISATION
The age of the Pyramid builders may be regarded as the height of Egyptian civilisation. The greatest accuracy in
stonework was reached during the fourth dynasty, when the Pyramid of Cheops, or Khufu, was constructed with an
average error of less than i in 15,000 of length, and of even less in angle. In the twelfth dynasty the granite sarcophagus
of Senurset 1 1, was wrought with an average error in straightness and parallelism of under seven-thousandths of an inch.
253
History of the world
The Great
Navy
of Egypt
Metals.
more of emotion than of character. After
that there is nothing but copjdng, good
or bad. The growth of shipping at the
early date of Snefeni, the end of the
third dvTiasty, is surprising ; and the
record that we happen to have shows
how much probably went on at other
times, there being built, in
one year sixty ships of lOO ft.
long, in the next year two
of 170 ft. long.
The use of copper is as remote
as the beginning of the continuous civilisa-
• tion in the prehistoric age, about 8000 B.C.
It increased in quantity down to the
eighteenth dynasty, and it was hardened
by using arsenical copper ores, and
leaving oxide in it ; this, with hammering
made it equal to soft steel for working
purposes. Rare instances of tin, probably
derived from natural mixture in the ore,
are knov\Ti from the third dynasty ;
but there was no regular use of it until
we find pure tin, also known about
1500 B.C. Thence bronze was the main
material until Roman times. Iron had
been sporadically found in the fourth,
sixth, twelfth, and other dynasties, and
was known for about 4,000 years before
it came into general use in Greek times.
This agrees with its having been obtained
from native masses
rarely discovered, as has
been the case in North
and South America.
Such native iron is the
result of volcanic action
on iron ore in con-
tact with carboniferous
strata. All these con-
ditions exist in Sinai,
and hence native iron
might be found there.
By about 800 B.C. iron
was used for knives, but
with a handle of bronze
cast upon it to save the
rarer metal. The iron
tools in Egypt from the
seventh to fifth century
B.C. are all Assyrian or
Greek, and it is not till
Ptolemaic or Roman
times that bronze tools
disappear.
The forms of tools
varied very little. The plain strip of copper,
which was used for an adze in the early
PRE.
Oldest
Rock
Drills
PRE
XII
widened at the edge, and had a slight con-
traction at the top to assist in binding it
on ; but the straight strip was kept up
for 7,000 years without any attempt at a
haft, simply lashed on to a bent handle.
It is not till about 800 B.C., or later, that
any use of a haft occurs in Egypt, and
then only for a hoe ; while in Babylonia
axes cast with a strong haft were used
before 3000 B.C. Nor was a haft used for
a hammer — a smooth stone in the hand
was the only beating tool ; while for
striking tools a wooden mallet was used,
cut out of a block. The axe began as a
plain rectangle of copper, sharp on one
edge ; projections at the back were added,
until they were half as long as the breadth
of the axe, but no haft was attempted.
The saw was used before the pyramid
period ; and also the saw and tube
drill set with hard stones for
cutting granite. Drills for bor-
ing vases were usually blocks
of stone fed with sand and
water, or probably emery for cutting the
harder stones. Socketted chisels were
an Italian invention in the later Bronze
Age, about 900 B.C., and were copied by
the Greeks, in iron, about 500 B.C. ; but
they were never used except under
Greek influence in Egypt. Shears are
also Western, and were
unknown till Greek
times in Egypt.
Glazing and Glass.
The very ancient art of
glazing, already used in
two colours under Mena,
did not take any new
form till the eighteenth
dynasty, when it was
greatly varied by new
colours and new appli-
cations. Large objects,
five feet high, were
covered with a single
fusing of glaze ; minute
ornaments, for stitching
on garments, blazed
with the brightest red,
green, blue, 01 yellow ;
while whole inscrip-
tions were executed in
coloured glaze hiero-
x//
Al^///
X I////
prehistoric age, became in historic times
254
TOOLS OF ANCIENT EGYPTIANS
The plain strip of copper used for an adze in the
early prehistoric age became in historic times
widened at the edge, and had a slight contraction
at the top ; but the straight strip was kept up for
7,000 years without any attempt at a haft, simply
lashed on to a bent handle. It is not till ah)out
800 B.C. that any use of a haft occurs in
Egypt and then only for a hoe. The different glyphs, inlaid in the
dynasties are mdicated in the examples here given. '^ y F ' ,, „,
wliite stone walls. Glass,
however, was not made separately until
about the time of Tahutmes III., 1500 B.C.
There is no earlier example of true glass,
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255
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
tGYPT
Prehis. 1st Dyii. XllthDyn. KVIII D.
KARIA
SPAIN
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THE BEGINNING OF THE ALPHABET
The signary which was used in various early ages is
here shown, as it has been gathered from examples of
over loo signs found in Egypt. Closely related to
these are the early alphabets of Karia and Spain, the
latter alphabet containing over 30 signs. It is from
this prehistoric signary that the present Roman
alphabet has been gradually selected during past ages.
256
nor any representation of working glass.
All the truly Egyptian glass was wrought
pasty, and never blown.
Blown vases belong entirely to the
Roman age and later times. The large
blown glass lamps of Arab age, covered
with fusible enamel designs, are highly
skilled pieces of work. The uses of
glass to the Egyptian were mainly for
beads, for coloured inlays in wood of
shrines or coffins, and for variegated
glass vases. The beads were made by
winding a thread of glass on a wire ;
the vases, likewise, were made by modelling
on an infusible core, held on a mandrel,
and winding coloured glass threads on the
body. The inlays were often of one
colour, generally deep blue imitating
lazuli ; but often mosaics were used,
made of a bundle of glass threads fused
together, drawn out, and then cut off in
slices. Such are all of Greek or Roman
age. An important use of glass in
Roman and Arab times was for weights,
and for stamps impressed on glass bottle
measures, inscribed with the names of the
ruler and the maker.
Lastly we may note the variations in
the nature of the Egyptian literature,
as reflecting the civilisation.
^^tK '^'^^ earliest tales are those of
°. ^ magical powers, belonging to
imcs ^j^^ pyramid age. Next, in
the Middle Kingdom, comes the contrast
between town and country, and the
tales of adventure in foreign lands. In
the New Kingdom the contrasts of
character are the main interest, and, in'
the late tales, the pseudo-historical
romance of the great tournament of the
Delta, or the antiquarian interests of a
priest. These subjects of romance
varied as much or more than the actual
grammar and language.
Alphabet. One subject of great
European interest should be noted here,
as Egypt has thrown much light upon it.
The origin of the alphabets of the Mediter-
ranean has been disputed, without his-
torical knowledge of the examples of such
signs in early ages. The Egyptian hieratic
and the archaic Babylonian signs may
have, perhaps, added a few to the Mediter-
ranean signary, but neither source can at
all account for it. The alphabet is by no
means a clean cut series of 22 signs ;
it is a very complex tangle of parallel
groups of signs in different lands, more or
less alike. Of these groups two of the
i7
2=57
PYRAMID OF MEIDUM : BUILT BY SENEFERU, LAST KING OF THE THIRD DYNASTY
This tomb was begun as a square block of masonry, and was enlarged by successive coats, which are here seen.
Then one smooth coating of sloping blocks was put over all from bottom to top, and so the first real pyramid
appeared in 4700 B.C. The pyramid coating has been destroyed and only the base remains under the rubbish mounds.
largest are those of Karia and Spain,
comprising over 30 signs, and these have
many points of peculiarity in common.
This is .sufficient to show that the fuller
alphabet is the original form, from which
the shorter lists have baen selected.
Now, in Egypt there are found scratched
on pottery and woodwork over 100 signs,
and these comprise the forms of the
fuller alphabet. Moreover, these Egyptian
examples are found at about 1200 B.C.,
or only a few centuries before the Karian
and Spanish alphabets, again in 3000 B.C.,
in 5500 B.C., and before 7000 B.C. Of 41
alphabetic signs, 19 occur in 1200-1400 B.C.,
32 in 3000 B.C., 27 in 5500 B.C., and 31 in
7000 B.C. As we have not a very large
amount of material, the occurrence of
from iq to 32 out of 41 signs is as much
as we could expect, as all the 41 occur
in one period or another. The early date
of these puts all derivation from the
subsequent hieroglyphics entirely out of
the question. We can as yet only say that
a large signary of 40 or more linear forms
was in continuous use from before 7000 B.C.
downwards, and that these furnish all
the forms of the fuller alphabets, those
of the short Phoenician and Greek list
of later time.
We have now outlined the rise of
civilisation in Egypt, apart from the
history of the country, which is dealt
with separately ; and we turn to the other
great valley of early civilisation, in Meso-
potamia, to compare the resemblances and
the differences between the two lands.
W. M. Flinders Petrie
NOTABLE DATES OF
ANCIENT CIVILISATION
EGYPT
BABYLONIA
B.C.
B.C.
8000
Continuous civilisation of
prehistoric age bi'gan . . s.d. 30
Before ,
7000
Asiatic invasion s.u. 40
6000 Susa founded
5800
Invasion of dynastic race
5500
Mfna rules all Egypt . . . . s.u. 80
5000 Ea founds Eridu and civilises the land
4700
Khufu builds Great Pyramid
4700 Earliest monuments of Kings
4500 Urnina
4000
Invasion from north
3800 Sargon and Naramsin, Semitic rule
3400
Middle Kingdom, twelfth dynasty
3300 Gudea
2500
Hyksos invasion, fifteenth dynasty
2250
Second Hyksos movement
2280 Elamites conquer Babylonia
2i2() Hammurabi
1580
New Kingdom, eighteenth dynasty
1572 Kassite dynasty
1380
Tell el Aniarna letters
1380 Burnaburiash
701
Taharqa (Tirhakah)
690 Sennacherib
570-
26 Aahmes (.Amasis)
556-38 Nabonaid, fall of Babylon
258
)SAi^v^A/^/v\/v^/vAyv\/v^/v^AA/^\/v^^^
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION
IN MESOPOTAMIA
BY PROFESSOR FLINDERS FETRIE
The first impression that strikes the
reader in passing from the Egyptian to
the Mesopotamian civihsation is the
lack of that unity and conciseness which
makes history in the Nile valley so
intelligible, and its problems so well
defined.
In place of the well ordered history of
Manetho, with its numbered dynasties,
and totals stated throughout, there is
practically nothing stated befor3 Nabunasir
in 747 B.C. The mythological extracts
from Berosus, and the list of Ktesias,
which cannot be identified with any
known facts, give no help in arranging
the outlines of the history. In place of
the uniform language and writing, which
develops without a break during the
whole history of Egypt, there is the entire
break from Sumerian to Semitic. In
place of the continuous importance of
Egyptian capitals, there is the change
from the principalities to Baby-
Disunion bn, and thence to Nineveh. In
° Y ^. place of the unified kingdom
Babylonia ^^ ^^^ ^-^^ ^^^^^^^ through the
whole written history, the greater part
of the documentary period is filled with
rival principalities, within thirty or forty
miles of each other, the tops of whose
temples must have been visible over
the entire territory of their respective
states.
As the general scale of Egypt is so
familiar to the modern reader and traveller,
it will be well to compare Mesopotamia
with that. Babylon was twice as far from
the sea as Cairo ; and from Babylon to
Nineveh was the distance from Cairo to
Sohag. Or in other terms, starting from
the sea, Babylon was a? distant as
Oxyrhynchos, Nineveh in place of Thebes,
and the highlands of Carchemish, Com-
magene, and Lake Van were the equivaient
of Nubia. The old land of Shumer was
just the size of the Delta, and Akkad as
large as Middle Egypt. The principalities
of Eridu, Lagash, Ur, Erech, and others,
were as far apart as those of the Delta —
The Nile
and the
Euphrates
Bubastis, Benha, Sais, or Sebennytos.
Indeed, it seems as if this were a natural
unit-size of early dominions in a fertile
plain.
Though the relative age of the beginning
of civilisation on the Nile and the
Euphrates is yet an uncertain matter, still
it is clear that the unification of Egypt
long preceded that of Baby-
lonia. The earliest date of the
scattered Sumerian kings is
about that of the fourth
dynasty ; the earliest Semitic dynasty —
Sargon and Naramsin — was contemporary
with the ninth dynasty, and the rise of
the dynasties of Babylon is of the later
Hyksos age of the sixteenth dynasty.
Euphrates Valley. The conditions
of the Euphrates valley are very different
from those of the Nile. On the Egyptian
coast the river runs into a strong current
in the Mediterranean, which sweeps away
its sediment and prevents any continuous
growth of the coast. But the Meso-
potamian rivers reach the sea-level at the
head of a deep bay, the Persian Gulf, and
hence there has been a continuous for-
mation of new land at the estuary. The
Mesopotamian valley and the Persian Gulf
form one long drainage valley gently sloping
down to a distance about twenty miles
outside Hormuz, where the valley bottom
drops suddenly three miles into the floor
of the Indian Ocean. The slope of this
valley so far as submerged, is about i ft.
to the mile, and it is i)robably even less
in the Babylonian plain, where sea-shells
are found as far up as Babylon.
Sea-shore j^^^ valley has been filled, and
the sea-shore pushed down-
Moved
47 Miles
ward, 47 miles in 2,200 years, or
115 ft. yearly, since Spasinus Charax — now
Mohammerah — was founded on the shore
in the time of Alexander. The account of
a sea expedition to Elam by Sennacherib
is usually interpreted as showing a more
rapid growth ; but in the uncertainty how
far he went down a channel before enter-
ing the Persian Gulf, it is not decisive.
259
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
How far back the extension of land has
been going on, and whether it was con-
tinuous to above Babylon, has not yet
been proved. The appearance of the map
much suggests that the original drainage
bed ended— i.e., the valley was sub-
merged— at about the nearing of the two
rivers by Sippara, and that all below this
is the filling up of the estuary. Should
this growth have extended uniformly back
so far, it would give limits to the possible
ages of cities — 5000 B.C. for Eridu, 8000 B.C.
for the whole plain of Shumer, 10,000 B.C.
for Nippur, and earlier for the site of
Babylon. This would bar the southern
region from being as old as Memphis, and
Eridu was probably open sea when
Menes laid out his capital.
Range of Civilisation. In looking
for the earliest movements of people
that we can trace, it seems that the
Semites must have extended from Northern
Arabia into Upper Mesopotamia and
Assyria. In short, Semitica stretched up
to the mountain ranges of Armenia and
Media. But the culture was barbaric,
and probably they were nomads who had
no fixed centres of life or stable organisa-
tion which could resist any united move-
ment. At this period the Persian Gulf
probably extended as far as Babylon.
On their eastern flank were the mountain
tribes, in what is known as Parthia and
Media, south of the Caspian. How remote
is the beginning of civilisation in this
region has been found in the last few years.
On the north-east extremity of Parthia,
in the far end of Hyrcania, stands a group
of mounds, near the modern Askabad,
not far from the celebrated Turkoman
stronghold of Geok Tepe. Here are 14 ft.
of town ruins with iron, 15 ft. with copper
and lead, about 70 ft. of ruins with wheel-
made pottery and domesticated animals,
and 45 ft. of remains with only rude hand-
made pottery. What ages these represent
we cannot judge until the full account
by Prof. Pumpelly is issued. But in any
case a very long period is involved. If
the accumulation is at the rate found in
Palestine, 4^ ft. per century, the periods
would be perhaps 1,500 years for the
THE PLAIN OF BABYLONIA: ITS EXTENT AT DIFFERENT PERIODS IN HISTORY
This map shows how the Plain of Babylonia has been extended down by silting since 10,000 B.C. The dotted
lines, marked 330 B.C. and 1830 A.D., show the known positions of the coast, as it shifted by silting up. These give
an approximate scale of dating for the coast-line of earlier ages, which is marked here at each thousand years.
260
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN MESOPOTAMIA
wheel pottery, and i,ooo years for the
rough pottery, before the beginning of the
age of copper.
At the other side of these countries
stands the great mound of Susa, with
over 80 ft. of ruins. The inscriptions show
that about 26 ft. of the height was accu-
mulated between about 4500 and 500 B.C.,
or in about 4,000 years. Yet before that
there is a depth of about 50 ft. com-
prising three periods. In the upper of
these is elementary cuneiform writing on
tablets. Below that is a period of rather
rough, thick pottery, painted with chequer
patterns and closely-crossed lines, of the
style common in early Syria and Cyprus.
And at the bottom of all is a great quantity
of very line, thin wheel-made pottery of
buff tints, with decoration of thin dia-
gonal lines, rows of ostriches, and various
patterns all derived from basket-work.
If the scale of accumulation of the
historic times were to apply here, it
would reach back to 12,000 B.C. ; but
if the far quicker scale found in Palestine
applied, it would hardly reach 6000 B.C.
. In any case we have here
k**4*"^'k^ evidence of a civilisation appa-
of Time rently much earlier than that
ime ^j- gg]~,yiQ^ja,, and none of this
earliest line pottery has been found in
the great plains. The highland civilisation
may have begun as early, or earlier, than
that of Egypt ; but that of Babylonia
started probably later than the North
African culture on the Nile. Seeing, then,
that there was a very early civilisation
at Susa on the west of Media, and that
further east on the limits of Parthia we
meet another early centre, it is not
surprising that the inhabitants of these
regions united to spread down into the
fertile plain which was created by the
growing delta of Mesopotamia. These
people belonged neither to the Semite
of Arabia nor to the Aryan of Persia and
India, but used an agglutinative language
of entirely different structure from these
others, and most akin to Turkish or
Finnish. Having descended from their
mountain homes, the people were known
as Akkadu, probably meaning " high-
landers," though there are other open
derivations. And hence the northern
part of the Babylonian plain, next to the
Semitic Assyrians, was the land of Akkad ;
while the southern part, next to the sea,
was known by the native Babylonian
name of Sumer, or Shumer.
SuMERiANS. The civilisation of the
Sumerians was more akin to that of the
Chinese than to western types, especially
in its art, its picture writing and devo-
tion to literature, its capacity for town
life, and its religious ideas. The cognate
origins of the people may well account
for this, and some more precise re-
, semblances led Terrien de
,.\'^**.^. Lacouperie to the view that
Links with ^, ■ ^ • v X-
„ . . Chmese civilisation was an
a y on offshoot from the Sumerian
stock in its old Parthian home.
The elements of life were well developed
by the Sumerians. They were great
agriculturists, and wrote works on the
main industry of man, much as the
Carthaginians wrote standard works prized
later by the Romans. They fermented the
grape and corn, and had alcoholic drinks.
Cattle of all kinds were raised, and prized
as stock, which was fed on grass or grain
or oilcake. The horse is mentioned first
in Semitic times, about 2000 B.C. Dates
and figs were the principal fruits grown ;
and, indeed, the date palm seems to have
had a far more important place in the
civilisation than it did in that of Egypt.
Both wool and leather were used for
clothing, as might be expected.
Building. The main structural in-
dustry of the country was that of brick-
making and building. Immense piles of
brickwork were made to support the
temples, marking clearly the custom
of the highlander Akkadi worshipping on
the hilltops. The brick ziggurat, or iive-
stepped pyramid, at Nippur was 190 ft.
by 128 ft., and about a hundred feet high.
The earliest baked bricks are 8'7 in. by
5"6 in. by 2"2 in., and they were enlarged
to 12 in. by 7*8 in. by I'g in. within the
Sumerian age. Toward the close of that
time large square bricks were used.
Sargon made baked bricks 18 in. square and
3^ in. thick. From the time of tJr-Engur
(3200 B.C.) onward the baked bricks were
II in. or 12 in. square.
f 'h" Grc Beside the baked brick used
^^ f ""^^ for pavements, drains,
mgs facings, and important work,
the great bulk was made up of crude
brick as in Egypt. For important pur-
poses, such as store-rooms, the inside of
chambers was lined with a coat of bitumen,
rendering them damp-proof ; and such a
lining was used on tanks. Pottery is
abundant in all ages, but we still need
a study of the pottery such as has been
261
-S^^^J-^i
THE ANCIENT BABYLONIANS AND THEIR WEAPONS OF WAR
There is a fine study of weapons on a carving of Eannatiim (4400 B.C.), where spears about 7 ft. long,
with blade heads, are figured. Shields are shown reaching from the neck to the ankles, straight-
sided, used edge to edge as a shield wall by a phalanx of soldiers. The heads of the men are
covered by well-formed peaked helmets reaching down to the nape of the neck, with nose pieces.
made in Egypt, so that it can be used
to date excavations in general. Stands
for jars, framed of vvood, were used as in
Egypt ; and also the cic^y sealings were of
the same type in bith lands. Stone vases
were made to imi te pottery ; and this
suggests that the
using basket-work
into the plain, a;
possess any types r
Tools and We
tools were used, sue
and great skill wi.
engraving upon harr
weapons there is a ii.
of Eannatum (4400
of about
shown :
neck to
263
hlanders were only
hen they descended
therefore did not
one work.
The common
s Knives and drills ;
develo]:)ed in seal
stone cylinders. Of
study on a carving
B.C.), where spears
7 ft. long, with blade heads, are
also shields reaching from the
the ankles, straight-sided, and
used edge to edge as a shield wall by a
phalanx of soldiers ; while the heads are
covered by well -formed peaked helmets,
with nose pieces, and reaching down to the
nape of the neck. Bows and arrows and
daggers were also used ; and stone mace-
heads, of the pear shape used in Egypt,
were important ceremonially, and often
bear inscriptions. Woodwork was elab-
orated with carving, and used for bed-
steads and stools, as seen in the seats of
the gods figured on seals and tablets.
Clothing. Clothing varied a good deal.
A primitive custom of nudity when offering
to the gods was continued down to the
close of the Sumerian age, as shown on the
tablet of Ur-en-lil. The kilt was worn
with a fringe, not reaching the knee ; or it
was worn from the waist to the ankles, as
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN MESOPOTAMIA
by shepherds. A robe over the left shoulder
reaching to the knee was used with a
deep fringe all down the front edge and
round the bottom. A long robe reaching
to the ankles is shown on the figures of
Gudea. But the most characteristic dress
was that of ribbed woollen stuff, much like
that of the fifth century B.C. in Greece, as
on the Running Maiden. This stuff was
worn as a flounced petticoat (Urnina 4500
B.C.), or in a longer form over the left
shoulder and down to the ankles, as by
Eannatum and Naram-Sin. A splendid
flounced cape and long robe of this stuff is
shown as worn by Ishtar on the Anubanini
rock stele, about 3600 B.C.
Science and Art. The system of num-
ber, weight, and measure was peculiarly
Babylonian. Some people have theorised
about all later standards having been de-
rived in various intricate ways from those
of Babylon. But it is very unhkely that
standards should not arise in different
centres, and still more unlikely that the
complex derivations should be formed
when the whole object would be to
maintain a system in common.
But there is no question of the great
advance of the Sumerian in these matters.
_ . The sexagesimal system, which
Science ■ s • i. i
IS far more convenient lor
tf . many purposes than the deci-
mal, and which we still retain
for time and for angle, was due to the
Sumerian intellect, while the standards
of weight, the talent, maneh, and shekel,
were also from the same source. And we
cannot doubt that the cubit was already
in use by a people living in cities and
carrying on business.
The style of art was clumsy, owing to
the habit of crowding together as much as
possible into the space, in order to form the
record. The human forms are thick and
short, and detail is firmly and perse veringly
repeated. It entirely lacks, in its early
stages, the spontaneous truth of the early
dynastic work in Egypt. At the close of
the Sumerian age, under Naramsin, there
is a fine bold design in groups of figures,
well proportioned, and with good action,
recalling curiously the spirit of late Greek
work from Praxiteles to the Pergamene
warriors. The stages of change cannot yet
be distinguished, owing to the scarcity of
the dated examples that we have.
Literature and Writings. It is in
lit':rature that we know the Sumerian
best. Unhappily, other branches of
archaeology have been neglected, and even
destroyed, in the eager search for tablets,
and yet more tablets. By the thousand
they are found, and hurriedly removed,
while the architecture, crafts, and art-
history are thrown aside in the process.
The hunter for tablets in Babylonia, and
for papyrus in Egypt, is a heartless wrecker,
without any interests beyond
°^* his own line. When so much
° . has been sacrificed for the
^^ written record, we must glean
all we can from it for the history of
the civilisation, as most of the other
material that might have been preserved
has been sacrificed. The Sumerian kin-
guage was the sole language of civilisa-
tion, until, at about 4000 B.C., the Semite
began to conquer and to take part
in the. advance of the world. Yet the
older tongue was by no means extin-
guished ; it held its place as the official
religious and literary language, like Latin
in Europe. The literature of the world was
in Sumerian, and only gradually did the
new Semite intruders translate the older
works or rise to writing a literature of their
own.
The Sumerian literature was for long
accompanied by a Semitic translation, like
Latin and Saxon gospels ; and syllabaries,
v^ocabularies, and grammatical lists were
written to teach the Semite the old religious
language. Legal documents were drawn up
in Sumerian, and it only gradually lost its
precedence from 4000 B.C. down to 1600
B.C., when it was almost extinct, being
only revived as a literary curiosity in the
.seventh century B.C.
The writing was a pictorial system like
the Egyptian hieroglyphics. And so long as
the Sumerian used it he clung to the
pictorial origin even though obscured by
the lineal style of drawing. On papyrus or
parchment it is easy to make curved forms,
and such were adopted in drawing the signs
originally. But on clay, which was the all-
available material in the
Babylonian plain, impressing
lines is far neater than
scratching them up ; and the
handv tool for making impressions was a I
slip of wood with a square end. Hence all
the curves tended to become four or five-
sided outlines, and all the detail became
built up of little lines tapering off to one
end, or "digs" with the corner of the stylus.
Yet down to the close of the Sumerian age
the forms of the objects can still be
263
How the
Semite Made
His Notes
Manseil
THE FINEST EARLY BABYLONIAN ART: TRIUMPH OF KING NARAMSIN, 3750 B.C.
This work, found in Siisa, is curiously free and pictorial ; it is unriva led by any early carvings, and most resemb es
the action and spiiit of late Greek sculpture. It marks the great period of the fusion of the Sumeriau and Semite.
264
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN MESOPOTAMIA
discerned, and they are still pictures rather
than mere immaterial symbols.
The Semite, however, changed all this.
He learned merely the sound values of
certain forms, their meaning could not
appeal to him, and he built up his words
out of these sounds or syllables. He found
it inconvenient to write in vertical
columns, which was the constant Sumerian
habit, and turned his tablet sideways to his
hand, so as to make his signs along a
horizontal line of writing. Hence these
signs became familiar to him on their
sides, and as they had to him no pictorial
values, the position was indifferent. Lastly,
he produced a syllabary of signs written
with combinations of four forms of impress,
a long line wider at one end, a short line,
a tall triangle, and a small equilateral
triangle, written in horizontal lines ; and
each sign was standing on what had ori-
ginally been its side. The wedge-shaped
form of these lines has given rise to the
name of wedge-writing, or cuneiform
writing for this system.
The knowledge of this writing survived
Greek influence for some four centuries
after iVlexander, only becoming extinct at
the close of the first century
e Story ^^ ^^^ ^^^ j^ -^^ ^^^^ history,
° * double that of the Roman al-
anguage pj-i^j^g^ at present, it had been
used for very diverse languages. The
Sumerian inventor had handed it on to
the Semitic intruder, and he had passed
it to the Syrian, the Mitannian, the
Hittite, and the Vannic peoples. Prob-
ably it had kept its hold in its first home
in Elam, where it is found in historic
times, and thence it became the writing
of Persia, and even of the Parthian, before
it became extinct. The variety of
languages and the extent of country
which it covered is much like the scope
of the Roman alphabet in Europe to-day.
Law and Religion. In matters of
law the Sumerian was well advanced.
The needs of city life which he had
developed necessarily required a full
definition of rights and duties. The first
law book was that of Ea, the god of
civilisation, the Oannes of the later
legends of Berosus. The decisions of
judges were kept in abstract, and such
case-made law served as a body of
precedent to guide decisions. The posi-
tion of women was on a level with that of
men ; in the Sumerian hymns the woman
takes precedence, and one of the great
<['> w ^> i M u
1 11
V A 3 E 3
A.
IJli III! k AA?
I ' BOW AND Wf
HARP ftRROW
FISH BIRD AX£ VASe
— ' ^f r^
FI5H
MA N
MONTH
fie to
THE DECAY OF PICTURE-WRITING
This illustrates the decay of pictures into signs, and
shows very clearly how the cuneiform writing was deve-
loped from the earlier hieroglyphics. It will be noticed
that the word originally rendered by a crude drawing
of the object— "fish," for example— retains even in its
final cuneiform style some resemblance to the tail of a fish.
The cuneiform lettering was necessarytotheB aby lonians,
as clay was the meet abundant material in their land
and could best be marked upon in lines without curves.
Sumerian divinities was Ishhtar, who
became Ashtaroth of Syria, Athtar of
Arabia, and hence Hathor of Egypt. In
the Semitic system the goddess is but a
feeble companion of a god ; but Ishtar was
the great divinity of war, to whom the kings
owed their triumphs, as well as the queen
of love, who ruled the course of nature.
The religion of the Sumerians was like
that of other Turanian races. These
peoples have an aversion to the idea of
a personal god, to which the Semitic
peoples cling. The Samoyede believes in
a multitude of local spirits, the Chinese
265
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
have their impersonal Heaven and the
host of gnomes or earth spirits. Thus
also the Sumerian thought of all objects
as having a zi or spirit, good or evil,
which needed to be appeased by the
weak or commanded by the sorcery of
the strong. Shamanism was the type of
religion ; and books of exorcisms and
THE SUMERIAN TYPE OF BABYLONIAN
The fact that the shaven type of face appears
in all the monuments back to 4500 B.C. indi-
cates that the Sumerians were shaven as they
were the older of the two main races in Babylonia.
magic spells were in permanent use. The
importance of the principalities naturally
led to their local spirits being of general
importance ; and hence the political
changes brought Sin the moon god of
Ur, or Utuki the sun god of Sippar and
Larsa, or Marduk of Babylon, into a
leading position, and led toward the
Semitic type of deities. How far this
change was due to the beginning of
Semitic influence we cannot now say.
Other native gods were less personal,
such as Ana the sky, Enlila the earth,
and Ea the .sea.
Types of Races. The physical type
of the people is .shown to us by the early
monuments, though we hardly yet know
enough of the early history to understand
them fully. Two main types stand out
entirely apart, the shaven and the full-
haired. And when it is seen that the
.shaven type is that of all the earliest
human figures, dating from 4500 B.C. and
extending down to even 2100 B.C., while
the full-haired type is not found on men
before 3750 B.C., it is clear that the
shaven is the Sumerian and the bearded
is the Semitic type. The remarkable
266
point is that the gods are represented
with long hair tressed up and long beards
from 4400 B.C. ; and as early as we can
go back there is never a figure of a beard-
less god. The reason probably is that
personal gods were of Semitic origin,
their worship was borrowed, and hence
their forms. If so, we must see a
large Semitic influence already acting on
the earliest known Sumerian art. The
variations of type may perhaps lead to
some further distinctions. The full,
curly, square- ended beard and long hair
are usual for the gods, as seen under
Eannatum (4400), Urenlil (4000), Gudea
(3300), and Hammurabi (2100). The
same beard, but with the hair done up
into a disc (as on the Tello heads and
Hammurabi), is worn by the King
Anubanini (3600). The long and rather
pointed beard is seen on Naramsin (3750),
and Hammiurabi (2100). The short,
square beard is seen on the god, under
Eannatum (4400), and on men about
THE SEMITIC TYPE OF BABYLONIAN
Men with full beards are not represented on Babylonian
monuments until 3750 B.C. ; hence it is clear that
such figures represented people of the Semitic type.
This portrait is from a sculpture of King Hammurabi.
Naramsin's age [see the seal of Ubilishtar].
The shaven type has a wide face, with a
large prominent aquiline nose, best seen
in the head from Tello. This type is
THE FAMILIAR BEARDED TYPE OF ASSYRIAN GODS AND MEN
Although the full-haired faces are later in appearing on the monuments of Babylonia, all ^^^^es of gods are shown as pos-
sessed of full beards and a wealth of hair. A familiar example is here reproduced. 1 . is supposed that the Semitic race
fn Assyria was the first to personalise the deities, and hence the resemblance of the images to the features of the Semites.
that of all the human figures on the scenes
of Urnina (4500), Eannatum (4400), and
Urenlil (4000) ; and in the figures of the
Scribe Kalhi (cylinder, 375o),Gudea (stele,
3300), the heads of the same age from
Tello, and the later head of beautiful
work at Berlin. The general conclusions
may be that the beard was worn and
admired by Semites, who elaborated a
very full type for the gods ; and that
the Semitic influx, though ruling under
Naramsin at Sippara, north of Babylon,
was yet subordinate at the later date of
Gudea, in tie Sumerian south.
Semitic / ;e. We now turn to the
later stage )i the civilisation, as it
flourished under the mixed race of
Sumerians as.d Semites, partaking of
the culture o^ the older race and the higher
moral tone •' the less advanced people.
The Sumerij . as we have noted, had
pushed down from the Median high-
lands into the growing plain of Babylonia,
while the earlier Semites remained to the
267
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
north in Assyria, and to the west in
Naharaina and Syria. Sooner or later
a fusion was inevitable ; as we have seen
already, the gods were of a Semitic type
at a very early time, and gradually the
union took place during three thousand
pond, and every ancient temple, with its
fortifying wall, was built out of a large
pit at its side which became the sacred
lake of the temple.
A higher branch of building was the use
of glazed bricks. In Egypt the use of glazed
out in the earliest dynasties, before
5000 B.C. ; but there was no glazing of the
bricks, because in so dry a climate the
Egyptian was never induced to burn his
bricks. In the wet and damp of Babylonia,
on the contrary, burnt bricks were usual,
and all the facings and main divisions
of structure were in the indissoluble
material, which held together and pro-
tected the mass of crude brickwork within
it. It was, however, mainly, or only,
in the later times — from the ninth century
onwards — that bricks glazed on the outer
face were used for building. It seems that
this was done not so much for utility — like
our modern use of glazed bricks — as
for the artistic effect of colours and
designs. The grandest example of such
work that is known is the facade of
years, until in the later times the product tiles for coating walls was boldly carried
was unified in one strong civiUsation
which spread its strength far and wide
to the Crimea, to Egypt, and to the
deserts of Central Asia.
Building. The old skill and abihties
found a wide scope in this larger frame
of life. The fundamental craft of brick-
work was carried on to a vast extent.
Every city had its great pile of an artificial
hill of bricks, built in stages to support the
temple of its god high above all. Immense
walls surrounded the cities ; those of
Babylon were some nine miles around, and
are stated to have been 85 ft. high and
340 ft. thick, surrounded by a moat lined
with burnt brick laid in bitumen. Not
only was brickwork used on this great
scale in the Babylonian plain where stone
was a luxury, but the force of example
was so strong that the
Assyrian, in his highland
home, kept up the same
scale of brickbuilding as
his teachers, and used
brick for his palaces and
temples when stone would
have been much more
easily available.
In Babylonia, as in
Egypt, the supply of
material for brickmaking
on a large scale is a
serious question. For the
great walls of cities, ob-
viously a surrounding ditch
was an advantage ; but
for the materials of houses,
temples, and ziggurats,
great pits had to be dug,
or older buildings pulled
down. At Nippur it was
found that the later
builders had torn down a
long piece of the disused
city wall and dug out
a great pit below and
around it. So in Egypt
the outskirts of every
village has its perilous
hole where the bricks are
A TEMPLE PLATFORM, OR ZIGGURAT, OF BABYLONIA
This restoration of the Temple of Bel at Nippur, from the designs of Hilprecht
and Fisher, gives a good idea of the massive character of Assyrian
. architecture. The portion marked (i) consists of a stage tower with a
made, which, in course of shrine at top and a long stairway leading thereto; (z) is the temple
j.;.„„ U.-,,-^ . « +„ 4- proper; (3) house for "honey, cream and wine"; (4) "place for the
time, becomes a stagnant Seiight or Bur-sir v*/ . »-
-sin"; (5) is the inner wall and (6) the massive outer walls.
268
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN MESOPOTAMIA
coloured glazed brick in relief, repre-
senting the royal archers, from Susa of the
Persian age, now in Paris, restored from
the fragments.
Beside baked brick, pottery was used
on a large scale. Great jars occur in the
earliest times, and cylindrical drains of
large size, sufficiently wide for a man to
descend in them for repair. In later times
coffins of baked pottery of the Parthian
age, and glazed coffins of slipper shape,
dating from the Sassanian period, are very
common on most of the city ruins. Un-
fortunately, sufficient attention has not
yet been given to the pottery of any age.
Wood was largely used in the more
wealthy ages, but it was always valuable.
A KING'S EMBROIDERIES
This illustrates the richness of the decoration on
the breast of an Assyrian king, whose complete
attire is seen in the other picture on this page.
as large timber had to be brought from a
distance. The great halls of the palaces
were all roofed with timber beams, and
panels of cedar lined the walls where
stone was not used. Probably palm trunks
and palm leaves served for ordinary
roofing, as in Egypt at present.
Clothing. Clothing became far more
elaborate than in earlier ages, and the
dominance of the more northern people
brought a fuller dress into customary use.
The Assyrian covered the whole body with
a tunic down to the knees, and the upper
classes wore a robe to the feet. Rich em-
broideries were usual among both Baby-
lonians and Assyrians, and the splendour
DRESS IN ASSYRIA'S GOLDEN AGE
Rich embroideries were usual among Babylonians and
Assyrians, and the splendour of Babylonian garments
was spread far in other lands by trade. The royal
head-dress in Assyria was practically the modern tarbush,
which has again been imposed on the East by the Turk.
of Babylo' 'aTi garments was spread far
in other 1 i - oy trade. The cap was
either cyli 1 or conical, and the royal
head-dress . .ssyria was practically the
modern ta. ' which has again been
imposed on ist by the Turk. Sandals
were used syria, and the boot so
characterisvi* the Hittite was also
brought in ' 'i the cold mountainous
country. W*- i wore a long, thin robe to
the feet, cc i sometimes by a tunic and
a cape. Bu itar is always shown in a
ribbed dres ^unced from top to bottom.
This is tht ,;ilar women's dress of the
western Se ; and its use, like that of
the beard Sie male deities, points to
the strong antic influence on the ap-
pearance ai b- r icter of the divinities.
The arm ihe Assyrian was much
the same ; in the early Sumerian
days. The d helmet became rather
taller, and t cover the back of the
head.' The t , and the bow and, arrow,
were the main weapons as before. The
old straight-sided shield was also used
in Assyrian times, but was partly super-
seded by the round shield considerably
coned. The extension of the kingdom
269
History of the world
Sculpture
5,000
Years Ago
brought in various auxiliaries, who differed
from the older Babylonians. Slingers,
northern horsemen clad in leather, and
mountaineers with woodman's axes, all
added new branches to the army.
Art. The arts were carried to great
perfection by the mixed population.
Broadly speaking, the best work is that of
the early age of Naramsin
(3750 B.C.), and that of the
late age of Ashur-bani-pal
(640 B.C.). Though not so fine,
yet probably the Hammurabi sculptures
are the highest between the early and late
schools. This would give intervals of 1,650
and 1,460 years between the successive
waves of art, and about 1,450 years more
to the glories of Baghdad, a period much
like that found on the Mediterranean,
though not coincident with it.
The finest work of Naramsin (3750 B.C.)
is his great stele from Susa, now in Paris.
It is remarkably pictorial in style, agreeing
in this with the pieces of a limestone stele
representing rows of combatants from
Tello, also in Paris. The figure of the
king is lithe, active, romantic in attitude,
the enemies and his soldiers are full of
animation. No Oriental sculpture has had
quite the same life in it ; and it recalls
the pictorial style of Crete and the later
Greek sculpture. The art of Gudea (3300
B.C.) is more cold and formal, and has not
the same fine sense of proportion ; it is
distinctly a period of survival and not of
artistic instinct, as seen, for instance, on
the limestone relief in B.erlin. The age
of Hammurabi (2100 B.C.) shows careful
portraiture, but not the spirit of the earlier
age ; the work is well finished, and there
was no hesitation in handling materials
boldly, as on the great black stele of the
laws, now in Paris. There was a fine
sympathetic treatment in private sculjv
ture, as shown in the beautiful limestone
head of a Sumerian in Berlin [seepage 266 \.
The last great age was that of the
Assyrian Emi)ire. Under Ashur-nazir-pal
(1S85) the work is fine and severe,
but without much expression.
Shalmaneser HI. (860) troubled
more about history than about
art, and his i)rincipal remains are the
long records of the black obelisk and
the Balawat gates, which are but clumsy
in the forms. Under Sennacherib (705)
there is a breadth of composition, as
in the siege of Lachish, which is
worthily aided by a more i:)ictorial
270
Fine
Later
Art
style, while under Ashur-bani-pal (668-626)
the art reaches both grace and vigour,
as in the splendid natural scenes of the
wild-ass hunt, in the lion hunt, and in
the garden feast with the queen.
Mechanics. The mechanical arts were
also greatly developed. The large size of
the buildings, the great quantities of stone
transported for the sculptures, and the
immense size of many blocks — the bulls
weigh nearly 50 tons each — all show that
there was not only considerable skill, but
also large ideals and directive ability.
Layard found that three hundred men were
wanted for drawing his cart bearing the
great bull ; and the sledge used by the
Assyrians for the transport must have
needed as many, or more. Long levers are
represented as having been used in a
very effective manner ; but the placing of
such great blocks exactly in the right
position required far more ability than the
GUDEA LED BY A GOD
This shows the Babylonian art at 3300 B.C., inferior to the
earlier style of Naramsin. The original is in Berlin Museum.
AN ARTISTIC TRIUMPH OF ASSYRIAN SCULPTURE
Under Ashur-bani-pal (668-626 B.C.) Assyrian art reached both grace and vigour, as is manifest in the splendid
natural scene of the wild-ass hunt, which is here reproduced from the original in the British Museum.
mere transport. The forms of tools were
much in advance of those used by the
Egyptians. As far back as Naramsin,
the copper axes were all well halted, gener-
ally with rings raised round the edges of
the haft hole to strengthen the band and
prevent it splitting.
The forms of the iron tools are also
excellent ; and iron seems to have been
w . ^ . common in Assyria at an
Modern Tools i- j . .r • ,1
- . . , earlier date than m any other
of Ancient , 1 1 1 j- " ^i
y^ . country, probably from the
tenth or twelfth century e.g.
Certainly the set of Assyrian tools left at
Thebes by an armourer of Esarhaddon in
670 B.C., show that the principles, and even
the exact forms, of modern tools had
already been reached. The chisels and rasp
have not been improved since ; the saw is
the same as the modern Oriental pull-saw,
but the teeth have not an alternate set ; the
centre-bits and files anticipate our forms,
but have not reached the complete stage.
The material of most of the edge tools is
steel, showing that the hardening was then
understood. The cutting of seals in hard
stones was an early art, but it was well
maintained, and some of the most beautiful
specimens are the chalcedony cylinders
such as that of Sennacherib in London.
The engraving of the inscriptions also
shows that cutting in hard stones was
freely done on a great scale ; but the
writing, being entirely in straight lines,
was much easier to engrave than the
figures of natural objects of the Egyptian
signs. Probably emery powder or copper
was the means used, as in Egypt.
The use of an official stamp of guarantee
on uniform pieces of silver was adopted by
the time of Nebuchadnezzar, but as this
is two centuries later than Greek coinage
it was probably copied from that. In one
respect the Mesopotamian never equalled
the Egyptian. The Memphite school of
work had attained to a mechanical ac-
curacy which we can scarcely gauge ; their
errors on large pieces of work were only a
matter of thousandths of an inch. But the
Mesopotamian never did a piece of passably
square or regular stonework ; the inequali-
ties and skew angles are glaring, even in
highly elaborated works of art. The sense
of accuracy was quite untrained, and
neither Semite nor Sumerian show any
ability in this line. Egypt, on the con-
trary, started with a prehistoric race which
excelled in exquisitely true handwork and
dexterous flint flaking, and
with the artistic sense of the
dynastic people added, the
combination was one of the
highest that the world has seen.
Literature. To give any adequate
idea of the literature of Babylonia is far
beyond our scope, and only the main
classes of it can be named in this outline.
These were :
I. Theology and Omens. 2. History.
3. Despatches and Correspondence. 4. Lan-
guage and Translation. 5. Mathematics.
6. Astronomy. 7. Geography and Natural
History. 8. Medicine.
The striking omission is that of literature
in the form of tales or poetry of actual
life ; there seems, amid all the myriads of
271
The Books
of
Babylonia
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN MESOPOTAMIA
tablets, to be nothing similar to the tales of
the various periods of Egypt. We look in
vain for the tales of the magicians, the
romances of adventure, of love, or of his-
tory, which restore to u- the living v'" *"
Egyptia" tbo-.-.-ij' Thi^ bdoniu.
-eve. ^ '- Y -r • :c,
,, 3etK . v. o lb ae^ pea in nis
theology , seems to have had no play
of fancy o aste for the excitement of
story-telling. Similarly in the Middle Ages
the " Thousand and One Nights," though
often referring to Baghdad, are yet
tales of entirely Egyptian source and
idea.
But for his own purposes the Babylonian
was well educated from a hterary point of
view, and, considering the complexity of
his writing, he was probably better trained
than any modern people except the Chi-
nese. The hundreds of signs which he
had to remember had long lost their
pictorial significance, and needed an atten-
tive memory and long training ; yet not
only in public documents, but also in pri-
vate letters, mistakes are but rarely
found. Classification of the signs, classified
lists of words of Sumerian and Semitic,
grammatical works, and reading books
were the apparatus used..
Wonderful ^^^^ ^^^ peasantry and
Training of sometimes the slaves
Babylonians learned to write, and there
was hardly more need of a professional
scribe than there is in England to-day.
But this general eucation belonged to the
Sumerian stock, and was much diminished
where the Semite was in the majority, so
that in Assyria only the upper classes could
write, and nail-marks of contracting parties
are common. The feeling for hterature kept
the names of great writers in remembrance,
and the authors of the main religious pieces,
such as the Epic of Gilgames, are still
known. The Egyptian, on the other
hand, has not preserved the name of a
single author ; even Pentaur was probably
only a scribe. The honouring of hterature
led to the Assyrian kings amassing great
libraries, and to the princes becoming
librarians and secretaries. The copying
of ancient tablets for the new libraries
was a large business, carefully planned ;
and the scribe was required to exactly
state where his original was defective and
what uncertainties existed in the reading.
Even private persons sought to obtain
favour by presenting copies of works
to the temple libraries.
i8
Shall We Find
an Assyrian
State History?
Of the classes of writings, the religious
works are noticed later ; the historical
writings are mainly Assyrian, recording
the constant wars with other lands, and
the tribute and booty brought from them.
That there was a complete State history is
shown by the ready allusions to the time
since certain events had happened. iVshur-
bani-pal recounts 1,635
years since the Elamite king
had carried off an image.
Nabonidus searched for and
found the tablet of Naramsin, which he says
had not been seen for 3,200 years ; he recites
that there were 800 years from his time to
Shagarakti-buriash, and 700 years from
Burnaburiash to Hammurabi. These
references show that we may hope to
recover a complete State history from
Assyria, as we may hope yet for a com-
plete historical papyrus from Egypt.
The despatches and correspondence give
full light on detail of politics and affairs,
showing the conditions of various countries ;
and where a sulhcient number have been
preserved together it is possible to build
up a continuous history of a period, as
in the case of the Tellal-Amarna letters.
The yearly annals of a reign belong more
to the historical division, and such records
of Sennacherib, Ashur-bani-pal, and others
are of the highest value. The private
letters give a full view of the current life ;
and the business documents, especially
receipts, are the commonest of all records,
showing the trade, the law, and the
business of the country in all its fulness.
The tablets dealing with the Sumerian
and Semitic languages together, and the
translations from one to the other, we have
noted already. The mathematical tablets
are multiplication tables, lists of multiples
of measures, tables of squares and cubes,
and plans with measurements along the
sides, which show the practical use of the
science. The astronomical records were
already tabulated in the time of the early
Semitic Empire, Sargon having
Beginning compiled for his library a work
°' in seventy-two books, the title
Astronomy ^^ ^^^-^^ -^ rendered "The
Observations of Bel." The purpose of this
was astrological, like the great mass of
short tablets reporting observations of a
later date. But the inquiries involved a
considerable familiarity with astronomical
movements, and a mass of records which
became of great value to the student.
The astronomical tablets of the Seleucid
273
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
period are of special value, as they often
contain valuable historical matter.
Law, In the domain of law the Baby-
lonian had early formulated a code from
the actual working of decisions. Case-
made law was his basis, as in most countries,
and abstracts of important cases were
carefully preserved as precedents. No
torture was used upon witnesses, and
ample investigation of the right of a case
AVIV'S'- #-
jw^^i
A KINGS LETTER OF 1400 B.C.
A clay tablet letter from Tushratta, King of Mitani, to
Amenophis III., King of Egypt, announcing the despatch
of valuable gifts and begging Amenophis to send him a
large quantity of gold as payment for expenses
incurred by his grandfather in sendmg gifts to the King
of Egypt, and also as a gift in return for his daughter,
a princess of Mitani, whom Amenophis had married.
seems to have been usual, with full cross-
examination. High penalties were stipu-
lated for the infringement of sales or con-
tracts. The status of women was equal
to that of men in the Sumerian, but became
inferior in the Semitic law. Slavery was
rather an assignation of labour than a
control of the person, as a slave family
could not be separated. Slaves could hold
property, own other slaves, give witness,
274
and were sometimes well educated. The
family union was strong, as inherited land
could not be sold without assent of
relatives, and boys and girls alike inherited
iiiLCstrte property.
The detail of the laws form a long study,
but w may here note the main sections
of tiie great code of Hammurabi, show-
ing the scope of the laws, and stating the
number of enactments.
Witchcraft 2 JNIarriage property 19
Legal falsehood 3 Women 32
Theft 3 Votaries property 7
Loss 5 Adoption 10
Child and slave steal- Assault 20
ing 7 Doctors 13
Robbery 5 Builders 6
Ro^'al messengers and Shipping 7
officers 16 Cattle 12
Agriculture 24 Hire 25, and
Accounts 8 Slaves 5
Licensed traders 6 Distraint Sc deposit 13
Thus the whole scope of an agricultural
and commercial community was well safe-
guarded, and little doubt left as to general
principles and penalties. All this must
have been the product of innumerable
cases and difficulties for two or three
thousand years, before' such a complete
code was set up.
History in Mythology. The religion
has usually occupied a large part of the
attention and interest given to Mesopo-
tamia ; it is comparatively well known
owing to the quantity of documents and
representations. Here we need only
mention such points as bear on the general
civilisation. We have already noticed
how the purely Sumerian Shamanism, or
belief in the spirit of every object, which
needed to be appeased, had been tinctured
by the worship of personal deities of the
Semitic neighbours, and how this influence
was shown by borrowing the Semitic beard
for the gods and flounced robe for the
goddesses, and occasionally for the gods.
Thus the Semite was the missionary of
theism as against animism.
On the other hand, the civilisation of
Babylonia is expressly stated to have been
given by Ea, or Cannes, who rose from
the sea of the Persian Gulf ; he passed
the day among men, and taught letters
and sciences and arts — the building of cities
and temples, and the use of laws and geo-
metry. Also he showed the uses of seeds
and fruits, and softened and humanised the
people, who had lived in a lawless manner
like wild beasts. This full ascription of civi-
lisation to sea immigrants shows that it
275
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
cannot be set down
growth, or as due to
still less to the Semite,
movement is roughly
belonging to the
city of Eridu ;
and 5000 B.C. is
the earliest date
at which we can
suppose the
ground of that
city to have been
dry land. Such
must be taken as
the extreme limit
of the early civili-
sation, and what
we find of the
early kings of
about 4700 B.C.
is the first effi-
cient rise of
monumental his-
tory in the land.
All this is paral-
lel to the early
civilisation in
as an indigenous
the Sumerian, or
The date of this
indicated by Ea,
came only a few centuries earlier than the
mission of Ea. It may be possible that there
is one common source of a seafaring people
for both civilisations, and, if so, we might
look to Hadhra-
mot as being in
the most likely
common centre.
At least, it is
always conveni-
ent to explain
the unknown by
the unknown.
The nature
gods of Apsu and
Tiamat , the ocean
and the chaos,
described in the
first tablet of
the Creation
series, belong to
the primitive
Sumerian. " The
waters of these
mingled in union,
and no fields
were embanked.
A CAT* p
",CENE IN
The interior of a castle, ii c- d b- a kind
compartments. In each is 1 cup of figures
reUgious ceremony. The p lion is suppon
adorned with a fringe of alte late flowers an
THE DAYS OF NINEVEH'S POWER
ground-plan v :h towers and battlements, is divided into four
iithe»- engage' in domestic occupations or in preparations for a
J ty columns probably of painted wood, and the canopy is
buds, like the usual Egyp' ian border. Beneath the canopy is a
groom cleaning a horse with a ^urry-comb. A eunuch at the entrance is receiving four prisoners. Above are two
mummers dressed in the skins of lions, while a figure with a staff appears to be the keeper of these monsters.
Egypt. That also came in apparently
from the Red Sea at about 5800 B.C.,
as the civilising movement which changed
the prehistoric age to the dynastic. And it
276
no islands were seen ; when the gods
had not come forth, not one ; when they
neither had being nor destinies." And
afterward " Evil they plotted against
A CHASE IN THE DESERT, RECORDED ON THE MONUMENTS OF NINEVEH
The series of which this bas-relief formed a part appears to have recorded the conquest by the Assyrians
of an Arab tribe or nation who made use of the camel in war as a beast of burden. This sculpture
belongs to a later period than the bas-relief from the North-West Palace at Nineveh reproduced below.
the great gods." After an attempt of
Anshar (perhaps the same as the Egyptian
Anher, the sky god) to subdue Tiamat
(tablet 2), Marduk, the sun god, gains the
victory ; and in tablets 3 and 4, the
supremacy of Marduk is finally confirmed
by all the gods. In this we seem to have
the echoes of a tribal history as in the
Egyptian theology. The Shamanistic
worship of a confused host of warring and
malignant spirits, is at last subdued by
the worshippers of personal gods under
Semitic influence, and of these the people of
the sun god take in the end the leading
place. All of these changes were, however,
long before the political domination of
the Semite, which began about 3800 B.C.,
with Sargon.
ROYAL SPORT IN THE DAYS OF ANCIENT NINEVEH
This bas-relief probably formed part of a subject representing the King of Nineveh in his chariot hunting
the wild bull. The warrior rides on one horse and leads a second, richly caparisoned, for the use of the
monarch. Numerous small marks on the body of the animal probably denote long and shaggy hair.
■ 277
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279
A VIEW OF HILLAH, THE MODERN BABYLON
We have now reviewed the questions of
the rise of civiHsation, as apart from the
ordinary history of the countries, which is
dealt with in its proper place in this work.
Though it is difficult, and rather mislead-
ing, to look at civilisation and the political
history apart, yet, so much has come to
light in recent years to clear our view of the
origins of culture that we may be allowed
to focus our attention on that view of
man, apart from his better known historv.
We seem at last to have reached back to
a definite beginning of arts and capacities
on both the Nile and the Euphrates, and
to have touched a condition of things that
seems to point in both lands to some
external source of a yet pre-existing
culture, which yet has to be traced.
I am happy to add that one of our greatest
Babylonian scholars, Dr. Pinches, concurs
in the view of his subject which is here
presented. W. M. Flinpfrs Petrie
THE EXILES IN BABYLON
" By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down ; yea, we wept," From the painting by Bendemann.
280
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION
IN EUROPE
By DAVID GEORGE HOGARTH, M.A.
OUT of the East came Light " has been
the text on which all great historians
of civilisation have preached, from the
authors of the Mosaic literature down
through Greek and Roman times to our
own. Hebrew writers have looked back to
Mesopotamia ; Greek writers to Egypt ;
Roman writers to Greece; writers of Western
and Northern Europe and the New World
to Rome, Greece, and Palestine. Their belief
is justified in so far as it is based on two
great facts. Man first found in the warm,
alluvial valleys of Southern Asia and
North-Eastern Africa the conditions of
chmate and soil most favourable to his
upward progress from the savage state ; and
from these regions, so soon as with increase
of numbers he was moved to migrate, his
steps were turned by the geographical
conditions surrounding his early homes,
in a general way, westward. He knew not
yet how to cross broad seas ; deserts,
sandy steppes, high mountains and tropi-
cal forests and swamps were
"Out of the
East
came Light
equally deterrent. The Polar
,, ice-sheet, which had extended
in Pleistocene times to the
Caspian, Black Sea, and Danube basins,
and still lay, in the dawn of human civilisa-
tion, far south of its present limits, pro-
bably rendered, with its wide fringe of
impassable moraine, forest, and tundra
country, all the lands included in the
present Emjiire of Russia singularly in-
hospitable. Whoso looks at the map of
the Western Hemisphere, bearing these
facts in mind, will see at once that the
line of least resistance, and, indeed, the
only possible line, led the men of the
great sub-tropic river valleys towards and
along the Mediterranean coasts.
In so far, therefore, as European civilisa-
tion is a state of things due to influences
from without, it is due to the East ; but
that is very far from the whole explanation
of its origin. The impulse to rise above
savagery has not always — not, indeed,
usually — come to peoples from without ;
and probably in primitive time, when
communications were slow and difficult to
a degree which we can hardly reahse, the
origin of local culture was seldom or never
to be accounted for thus. In modern days
there have been obvious instances to the
contrary ; but even now it remains to
be seen how far civilisations originated
among absolutely barbarous peoples by
-,..,. ,. contact with higher races are
Civilisation , i i- • ,, ^^
from ^ ^ hvmg growths. Ex-
Without amples of the modification and
possible elevation of ancient
indigenous societies by incoming aliens,
such as have been seen in Mexico or Peru,
India or Japan, Egypt or Barbary, are
not in point ; for in these cases local
civilisations certainly existed long before
the foreign influence. We must look to
the history of the relations of white and
negro, or other savage, races in the homes
of the latter, and the results of such
inquiries are far from conclusive. Does
civilisation so originated grow and thrive ?
Do even the races thus civilised themselves
any longer thrive and grow ? Our antipo-
dean colonies, and the story of the native
races of North America, if there were no
other instances, would not admit a cate-
gorical affirmative. Nay, rather, the
evidence so far available tends to discount
the permanence of transferred civilisation,
and to throw doubt on the continued
vitality of races so civilised.
It is necessary to raise this question at
the outset of the present essay because it
has been too often assumed, both implicitly
and explicitly, by historians of our civilisa-
tion, that all the cultural devel-
opment of Central, Western,
and Northern Europe has been
due to alien influence, exerted
from the south and south-east, ana
mainly by the agency of the Greek,
Graeco - Roman, and Grseco - Romano -
Semitic (the Christian) systems. Maine's
famous dictum that " Nothing moves in
the world which is not Greek in origin "
has long dominated our thoughts. Yet
that magnificent generalisation is contrary
281
The Escape
from
Savagery
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
not only to inherent probability, but to
known fact. Escape from the savage
state, as Buckle showed, depends in the
first place on the existence of such con-
ditions of geographical environment as
favour the accumulation of wealth and
the development of a leisured class — that
is, such as conduce to the production of a
^ ... good deal more than the mini-
_ ,. , , mum necessary lor lite. It
Essential for j^i r v_ ^ i i
^. ... ^. can, therefore, have taken place
wherever man found compara-
tively genial climate and remunerative
soil, and, in process of time, made for
himself, by clearing forests or draining
swamps, an arable area which would feed
him and his more abundantly than was
absolutely necessary.
Where these conditions were presumably
present it is unreasonable to suppose that
the beginnings of civilisation were deferred
age after age, until late in time some
stimulus chanced to be imparted by an alien
race or races which had, after all, advanced
towards their own civilisation, albeit
earlier, through the operation of similar
conditions elsewhere. In the European
areas inhabited by the Celtic and
Germanic peoples, for instance, long
before we have the slightest reason to
believe that these can have come into
intimate relation with the civilisations of
the South and East, both climate and soil
were unquestionably favourable, and local
civilisations cannot but have been origin-
ated independently. As has been well said,
" Man everywhere has the same humble
beginnings " ; and, up to a certain point,
which is found to be, in fact, far later
than the inception of some kind of culture,
he will satisfy his primitive needs and
desires in very much the same ways.
Under certain conditions, known
to have arisen independently in many
different regions of the earth, articles of
luxury and art, irrefragable witnesses to
incipient civilisation, begin to be produced
- ^ spontaneously. To what re-
Spontaneous . • i i j.
J: ... ^. mote periods have not cave
Civilisation '
in Europe
deposits thrown back the
history of artistic effort in the
valleys of Gaul ? And what credit, in
reason, can be given to Greece, or even to
Rome, for the elaborate social order of the
Teutonic tribes, which was of ancient
standing when first the Romans pene-
trated beyond the Danube and Rhine ?
So well rooted in the soil, so potent and
so widely diffused were the Teutonic and
282
Celtic social systems, that in the history
of our actual civilisation they are factors
as worthy of consideration as the influences
of Rome, Greece, or Palestine. If Graeco-
Roman Christianity came greatly to modify
them in the end, they had, perhaps, ere
that, modified Christianity itself hardly
less ; and the social superiority of the
northern and western adherents of the
now dominant religion is probably as
much due to character and habits deve-
loped before ever its creed was formulated,
as the dominance of the Turkish peoples
in the Islamic system is undoubtedly due
to social characteristics evolved in the
oases and steppe-lands of Central Asia far
back in the " Times of Ignorance."
Let it, therefore, be understood that in
the following pages it is not necessarily
the whole origin of European civilisation
that is being set forth, but the modi-
fication and heightening of probably
pre-existent European culture by the first
influences of the Nearer East which can
be supposed to have reached it. Of these
influences the effect is to some extent a
matter of inference only. We cannot
always, or, indeed, often, point with any
assurance to actual results of their action.
In great part we must still be content
with little more than a demonstration
that directly along certain lines of com-
munication, or indirectly through certain
intermediaries, the civilisations of the
South could, or did, come into relation
with European areas at an early age.
The sea routes which were
e wo jYiost likely to be used in ruder
« P ages by Levantine mariners,
after leaving the Nile estuaries
or the Syrian ports — which, as a matter of
fact, are known to have been most used —
are : that which followed the littoral of Asia
Minor to Rhodes, whence it bifurcated, to
Crete on the one hand, and to the ^Egean
isles and coasts on the other ; or that strik-
ing across the narrow strait to Cyprus, and
thence by way of Rhodes, or directly, to
Crete. In connection with both these
routes, the importance of Crete and
Rhodes, and especially the former, must
be obvious. Thence the Cyrenean and
Carthaginian })rojections of Africa were
reached with greater ease than by way
of the littoral to west of Egypt,
which, for some hundreds of miles, is
desert, reef-girt, almost harbourless, and
pitilessly vexed by an on-shore wind.
From Carthage, Sicily and the Italian
O 1«« JOO 300
THE GREAT SEA ROUTES OF ANCIENT CIVILISATION
Along: the routes marked in this map lay the course of ^gean and Phoenician civilisation. The importance of Crete
and Rhodes in the spreading of civilisation is clearly seen; they may be called the "half-way houses" between
Mesopotamian culture, with its seat in the valley of the Euphrates, and Egyptian culture, in the valley of the Nile.
peninsula were readily accessible, or the
Gibraltar strait and the Iberian shores
could be made after coasting a littoral
much kinder to navigation than that
between Egypt and the western bight of
the Syrtis.
The land routes in chief were also two.
The Nile valley, closed by desert on the
_ western side, had comparatively
g ^ easy access to the great natural
¥ J n 4 road which, leading northwards
Land Routes , , ' . o , ^ ,
through Syria, passes at first
along the Palestinian littoral, and then
through the central cleft between the
Lebanons to the Orontes valley. Mesopo-
tamian traders, following up the Euphrates
till they had left the desert part of its
course behind them, fell into this same road
in the region of Aleppo and Antioch.
Thence by the easy passes which turn the
southern end of Mount Amanus, the com-
bined caravans reached Tarsus, penetrated
Taurus by the gap of the Cilician Gates,
and found themselves on the plateau of
Asia Minor with a choice of easy routes
leading either to the rich western littoral,
or the north-western straits, and from
any and every point offering safe passage
to South-eastern Europe. This was the
only land route for Egyptian civilisation.
But the Mesopotamian had an alternative
one, leading by way of the upper Tigris
valley to the north of Taurus and the
Cappadocian plateau, whence it descended
the Sangarius and debouched, like the
first route, on either the north-western or
the western coast of Anatolia.
In speaking of such land routes, we do
not, of course, mean to imply the existence
of any made road, nor even of a single
track. When most definite, they probably
resembled the Syrian Pilgrim Way — a
skein of separate paths now spreading
widely, now running into and across one
another ; and doubtless the early tracks
diverged far more than this, and making
great elbows, followed now one valley,
now another, to meet again only after
many days. One of the great hues from
Mesopotamia to the western Anatohan
coast, that described last in our enumera-
tion, came to be defined more strictly
than the rest, perhaps by the Kings of
Nineveh and their " Hittite " rivals and
allies in Cappadocia, and was known in the
Persian era to the Greeks as the Royal
Th R 1 ^^^^ " °^ ^^^ ^^^*^ go up iuto
c oya ^gjg^" g^^ ^^ ^Yie much earlier
into As^a ^^^^ 'With which we are most
concerned, the influences of the
East did not rush westward torrent-wise
in one bed, but soaked slowly, finding a
way now here, now there, in one general
westward direction, and sending offshoots
far out to right and left of the main
streams.
283
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EUROPE
It has been said that there is evidence
of the routes just indicated having been,
in fact, those most used. It is upon these
hues, and no others, that we find certain
remarkable focuses of early culture dis-
posed as half-way houses between theMeso-
potamian and Egyptian civilisations on the
one hand, and continental Europe on the
other. These are, in relation to the sea
routes, first, the prehistoric iEgean
civilisation, focused from the first in
Crete, but extended to all isles and
peninsulas of South-eastern Europe from
Cyprus to Sardinia and Spain ; and,
secondly, the Phoenician, originated on
the Syrian coast, but focused also at a
later time at a second point much farther
west — namely, on that Carthaginian pro-
jection, whence lay easy sea-ways to Sicily
and Italy and all the western seas. Hard
by the Egyptian land route lay this same
Phoenician society; while all about its
point of junction with the Euphrates
road, on both its continuations north-
westward, and on the northern road from
Mesopotamia so soon as this had passed
Euphrates, was established the singular
but as yet little understood
Half-way civilisation which we call
Hittite. How early we may
Houses of
Civilisation
assume the latter's existence
in North Syria is still doubtful ; but since
the discoveries of Winckler at Boghaz Keui,
there is little question that it was focused
in prehistoric time in Northern Cappa-
docia, whence its influence seems to have
radiated southward to the confines of
Palestine, and westward to Lydia and
almost the shore of the ^gean Sea. It
is to this North Cappadocian region
that the Tigris route from Assyria and
Babylonia, which was afterwards the Per-
sian " Royal Road," tended. Among these
civilisations the most imjiortant for our
present purpose is the ^gean, because
its geographical area touched at some point
all the westward roads, whether by sea or
land ; and, moreover, because it is the
one which actual evidence both dates from
the remotest antiquity and most clearly
proves to have been operative on Europe,
especially on the most expansive of its early
cultures, the Hellenic. The recent explora-
tion of Crete, due in the main to Messrs.
Arthur Evans and Federico Halbherr, has
enhanced enormously the significance of
the civihsation revealed to the modern
world at Hissarlik and Mycenae by the
faith and fervour of Henry Schliemann.
Far-back
Evidences of
Culture
We are now assured of certain facts of
much moment to our inquiry. Firstly,
that this civilisation was developed origin-
ally from its rudest beginnings within the
JEgean area itself. This is proved by
evidence of the uninterrupted evolution
of fabrics and decoration, especially in
ceramic ware, produced at Cnossus from
the dawn of the historic
Hellenic period right back to
Neolithic time. At various
points in this long retrocession
we can place the Cnossian culture in
synchronic relation with the Egyptian
by the presence both of Egyptian objects
in the ^gean strata, and ^gean in the
Egyptian. These points correspond with
the highest developments respectively
of the New, Middle, and Old Pharaonic
Empires — moments at which we should
naturally expect to find evidence of inter-
national communication. The earliest
point indicated by these synchronisms
lies possibly as far back as the First
Dynasty, if certain vases, exported
apparently from the ^Egean as vehicles
for colouring matter, and found by
Dr. Petrie at Abydos, are accepted as of
the remote date to which their discoverer
attributed them ; but in any case the con-
temporaneity of some part of the Old
Empire period with the iEgean civilisa-
tion is assured, and that, moreover, when
the latter was already far advanced
beyond its rudest origins, as represented
by the contents of the thick strata of
yellow clay which underlie the earliest
structures at Cnossus.
Thus is the indigenous origin of Mgean
civilisation assured. So also is the in-
dependence of its after development.
The typical Cretan pottery, known as
the " Kamares " style and Hneally
descended from Neolithic ware, which
attained, about the acme of the Pharaonic
Middle Empire a perfection both of fabric
and ornament worthy of the highest
ceramic products of any age,
-,.^... ^^.'^^ remained absolutely distinct.
Civilisation t-, ■ , j ,
. ., ,. Ihe same mdependence cha-
ts Native , ■ f ,
racterises a later ceramic
product of the i5igean, a glazed ware with
monochrome decoration, which went into
Egypt abundantly under the Eighteenth
Dynasty, and especially when Amen-
hotep IV., " Khuenaten," was reigning
in his new capital at Tell-el-Amarna. Nor
is iEgean art distinctive only in its
humbler products. The frescoes, the
285
HISTORY
WORLD
rinr
THESEION TEMPLE, ATHENS: DORIC ORDER OF ARCHITECTURE
The perfection of the Hellenic style, derived from^gean architecture. 5th century B.C.
plaster reliefs, the chased work in precious
metals, the ivory carvings, and the gem
intaglios of the JEgea.n area, of which Sir
Charles Newton said thirty years ago that
they were not to be confounded with pro-
ducts of any other glyptic art, show the
development and retention of an in-
dividual naturalistic style — a style
which reacted on the fresco paintings L^_
of Egypt itself under Khuenaten.
Finally, to clinch the proof of its
independence with the strongest pos-
sible argument, the JEgesin civilisa-
tion, as soon as it became articulate,
evolved for itself, in Crete at any rate,
a system of writing, displayed to us
on some thousands of surviving clay
documents, which was purely its own,
and cannot be interpreted by com-
parison with any other known script.
Secondly, it is now known that
this civilisation, of remote indigenous
origin and independent development,
reached a very high point of achieve-
ment in many respects which afford
the best-known tests of culture —
namely, in its artistic products, ex-
tant examples of which of^er ample
evidence of wonderfully close study
of natural forms, of mastery of
decorative principles and their exe-
cution, and of a sort of idealistic
quality, which has been rightly
called " a premonition of the later
286
Hellenic " ; also, in
architectural construc-
tion and the organisa-
tion of domestic com-
fort, as displayed in the
palaces at Cnossus and
Phffistus, with their
superposed stories,
their broad stairways
of many flights, their
rich ornament, their
arrangements for ad-
mitting air and light,
and their astonishing
systems of sanitation
and drainage. The
written documents
tound, though still
undeciphered, plainly
attest an advanced
knowledge of account-
keeping and correspon-
dence. The frescoes and
gem scenes, as well as
many surviving objects
of luxury, attest the existence of a leisured
and pleasure-loving class ; and, lastly, the
tribute-tallies of Cnossus support the in-
ference which is legitimately drawn from
the uniformity of certain material objects
all over the .-Egean area at certain periods
TEMPLE OF WINGLESS VICTORY : IONIC ORDER
The perfection of the second Hellenic style, refined from the Doric,
probably in the first place by Asiatic Greeks. Fifth century B.C.
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EUROPE
— notably that contemporaneous with the
earUer part of the Eighteenth Egyptian
Dynasty— and also from the wide range of
certain place-names, that there was an
extensive imperial organisation. The centre
of this empire, as well as the original focus
of the civilisation, was almost beyond ques-
tion in Crete. The prejudice in favour of
other focuses raised by the priority of
JEgesm discoveries elsewhere, especially
those made in the Argohd, has been greatly
weakened by demonstration of the superior
catholicity and quality of Cretan culture,
and by recognition of the failure of Mycenae
to offer evidence of anything like the same
antiquity. And no more need be said here
to counteract it than that, if Buckle's
statement of the climatic and geographical
conditions necessary to the first develop-
ment and upward progress of culture be
sound, those conditions were never present
in plenitude, any where in the vEgean area
except in Crete. There are found in the
most conspicuous degree the combination
of these geographical features— large tracts
of fertile and deep lowland soil ; moun-
tains so situated as to cause abundant
precipitation, and so high as
The Contact ^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^ against the early
of Early
Civilisations
summer ; absence of both
swamps and desert areas ; and
a climate not prone to extremes.
Like all other high civilisations the
^gean both borrowed and lent. Since
its debts could be contracted only with
contemporary cultures as high as its own,
they were owed mainly to Egypt and
Babylonia, while its loans went out
chiefly to lower civilisations further re-
moved than itself from the eastern centres,
those, namely, of the European continent.
As regards Egypt, something has been said
already of its intercourse with the iE:gean
in all ages of the latter's prehistoric
period. The evidence of that intercourse,
known even before the exploration of
Crete, was fairly abundant, though
limited almost entirely to later ages of
^gean culture, often caUed particularly
" Mycenaean." The " pre-Cretan " case
was set forth very concisely in a paper
read before the Royal Society of Literature
in 1897 by Professor Flinders Petrie, who
enumerated the objects of Egyptian fabric
or style found on ^Egean sites, notably at
Mycenae, and in Cyprus and Rhodes ;
and of objects of .<Egean style or fabric
found in Egypt, notably at Thebes,
Memphis and Tell-el-Amarna, and in the
Fayum. One word of warning only
may be added — that the occurrence ol
such imported objects, especially if they
be of the amulet class, on a site of a certain
date does not necessarily imply exact
contemporaneity with the period at which
the objects were actually produced; for
they may well have been carried hither
and thither in the stream of
What Crete ^j-g^^g jq^ some time ere coming
^^ . to rest, and been long preserved
Taught us aftgi-wards. Some of the
Cypriote and Rhodian tombs, for example,
in which scarabs and other Egyptian
objects of the Eighteenth Pharaonic
Dynasty have been found, are probably
considerably later than that dynasty.
Crete has largely reinforced this evidence,
not only by throwing it back to a much
earlier time than that of the Eighteenth
Dynasty, but by proving that in its later
periods JEgea.n art had come to be con-
siderably modified, both in forms and in
motives and treatment of decoration, by
the art of Egypt. We have then to do,
not merely with mutuahy imported objects,
but, much more than was previously
understood, with the mutual action of
influences — the strongest possible proof
of close intercourse. On the.^gean side,
our sole concern at present, are now found
scenes represented in fresco-painting or
metal-work — for example, the mural
scene with a river and palms at Cnossus,
and the well-known cat-hunting scene
inlaid on a Mycenaean poniard — and also
decorative motives which are of obvious
Egyptian parentage. Other motives pro-
claim their aliea origin by more or less
mistaken treatment. The best instance
in point is the use made of the lotus
motive in Greece and the isles, where the
flower was never domiciled.
For influences of the Mesopotamian
civilisation we have to look in the main
to the early civihsations of Syria and Asia
Minor ; but evidence is not wholly wanting
on iEgean sites. A Babylonian
Influence of (, i^^der came to light at Cnos-
Egypt and ^^^ . ^^^ fashion of dress,
Mesopotamia ggpg^^i^Hy female, as shown in
iEgean frescoes and gems, is very like
the Babylonian, from whatever primitive
garments it had been developed ; and in
other respects also the intagho class of
Mgean art products shows at least as
much Mesopotamian as Egyptian in-
fluence. It has borrowed the decoration of
both cyhnders and scarabs ; but it proves
287
PALLAS ATHENA, THE MAIDEN GODDESS OF ATHENS
One of the chief glories of the art of ancient Greece left to the modern world. Athena was the goddess and
protectress of Athens, and her statue stood at the height of the Acropolis, dominating the city.
288
THE SUPREME MONUMENT OF ANCIENT GREECE LEFT TO THE MODERN WORLD
The Venus of Milo, one of the noblest examples of Greek art, and one of the most famous statues extant. Found
at Milo, in Crete, about loo B.C., and now in the Louvre, Paris. ,
19
289
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
its essential independence all the time by
never adopting the forms of either of those
characteristic alien vehicles of glyptic art.
Lastly, in the most important of all
aspects of early civilisation — the religious —
we now know that the ^^igean approxi-
mated very closely to the old civilisations
to south and east of it. The main idea
of its cult was that which seems
Religious
Ideas of
Early Times
to have been the oldest and the
most dominant in such cults —
namely, the worship of the re-
productive force of Nature. This idea was
embodied, as soon as divinities were
imagined in human shape, in feminine form,
the desired relation of divinity to humanity
being expressed by the addition of a son-
consort. How far other features of this
cult, common to the south-eastern lands —
such as the descent of the son to the
human race, his periodical death at the
hands of the latter, and his joyful resur-
rection— were present, we do not yet
know. It would probably be false to
ascribe the presence of this cult idea in
iEgean civilisation to any foreign influence,
for it seems to be a necessary expression
of the religious sense of many peoples,
and is as likely to have been as indigenous
in the case of Rhea and Zeus (to give the
Divine pair their possible .-Egean names) as
in those of Isis and Osiris, or Ashtaroth and
Tammuz-Adon. But we may note first
that here was a vital bond of affinity
between the ^^gean folk and their main-
land neighbours on east and south, and
second, that long before historic Hellenic
times the former had arrived at that essen-
tial condition of progressive civilisation, an
anthro})omorphic conception of divinity.
Enough has now been said to show
that /Egean civilisation was both a broad
channel througli which influences of Asiatic
and Egyptian culture could and did flow,
and also in itself of such importance as to
be likely to exert influence on nascent
civilisation in Europe. To see whether
it did so, we look first to the
culture which succeeded
it in its own area, the
Hellenic culture of the his-
toric age, about whose action, exerted in-
directly on all subsequent civilisation, there
is no possible doubt. And at the outset
stress must be laid on the fact that we are
dealing, in respect of the two civilisations
in question, with one and the same geo-
graphical area. There is here no question
of alien influences dependent on short or
290
The Greek
Debt to /Egean
Civilisation
long communications by sea or land. The
Hellenic race, if indeed to be distinguished
from all elements in the earlier iEgean,
came into the very domain of the latter,
and experienced by actual contact the full
force of the pre-existent culture. This being
so, the probability of heavy debts having
been contracted by the later culture to the
earlier is enormous ; and it becomes all
but certainty when the few facts which
we know about the early history of the
Hellenic peoples proper come to be con-
sidered in the light of ascertained general
laws governing the relations of inter-
mingled races.
It is clear that the Hellenic tradition of
a great descent of peoples from the north
into mainland Greece and the western
isles, about 1000 B.C., enshrines substantial
fact. These peoples, possessed of iron
weapons, were superior to the ^Egean folk
in war, but evidently inferior in the softer
social arts. The Greeks called them
Dorians, a name afterwards associated
with the most distinctive, but the least
cultivated, of the historic races of the
peninsula — a race, however, possessed in
its full form of the conception
merging ^^ ^j^^ city-state ; which im-
u ,, . plied the subordination of the
Hellenism • t • i i , .1
mdividual to the corporate
body, and was the chief social message to
be taught thereafter by the Greek to the
world.
Without calling these invaders by any
one name, or supposing Northern folk to
have made then their first appearance in
the ^gean area, we may safely see in this
Greek tradition the record of a cataclysmic
change out of which historic Hellenism was
to issue at the last. In proof of the invader's
inferiority in the useful arts we have the
undoubted fact that the command of the
Greek seas, formerly held by Cretans and
other JEgesLTi folk, passed for some cen-
turies into Semitic hands — the hands of
those Sidonian Phoenicians whose coming,
but as yet incomplete, " thalassocracy," is
reflected in the most important of con-
temporary documents, the Homeric lays,
and, under the lead of the Tyrians, was to
grow greater yet. To illustrate their
inferiority in the luxurious arts we have
the dry, uninventive style of artistic
decoration known as the " Geometric,"
which also lasted for some centuries. It
is evident that the newcomers were con-
quering soldiers, who destroyed, but could
not of their own virtue create.
2qi
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Now, the course of events after all
such conquests, if permanent but not
exterminative, is the same. The rude
military invaders, finding themselves de-
ficient in woman-folk, take not only slaves
but wives from the civilised people of the
soil. The resultant children tend more and
more, as time goes on, to be influenced
by their native mothers. In them previous
culture begins to revive, and ere many
generations are past, so completely is the
new race assimilated by the old that the
language in general use is that not of
the conquerors but of the conquered.
For a crucial instance we need look no
further than to the after history of the
Norman invaders of Britain ; and we
might almost assume, were there no actual
memorials of the fact, that the civilisation
which arose anew in the ^gean area, after
the tumultuous period reflected in the
Homeric lays and the Greek tradition of
early Asiatic colonisation, was largely
influenced by what had been there in the
^gean Age. There is, however, proof that
such was indeed the fact. As will presently
be pointed out, the long period of unrest had
allowed other alien influences to
e as an gj-j^gj- HeUas, notably the Sem-
^ itic from Phoenicia. But be-
side what appears to be Asiatic,
and also beside what was new and dis-
tinctively Hellenic in the historic culture,
which became prominent from the ninth
century onwards (and this includes such
all-important features as the conceptions
of a supreme Father-God, and of the
city-state — an idea of social order as
obdurate to southern influences as our
own Germanic social order has proved) —
beside all this, the " non-Hellenic " ele-
ments in the civilisation are almost
entirely such as may be referred to Algain
I)rototypes. Hellenic art, which flourished
j)re-eminently among the non-Dorian in-
habitants, is distinguished from Eastern
art by just those distinctive qualities of
both realism and idealism which dis-
tinguished the highest art of the ^gean
Age. Hellenic religion has for its oldest,
most universal, and most popular deities
various feminine impersonations, indistin-
guishable from the earlier Mother-Goddess.
The chief of these is the unwcddcd Artemis-
Aphrodite, su]neme patroness of life
all through the historic period of pagan
Greece, the essential features of whose
cult are still dominant in the observance
of the Greek peasant -worshippers of the
292
Christian Virgin. Hellenic cult is full oi
interesting survivals of the Tree and Stone
ritual amply attested in ^gean cult.
Hellenic custom retained many traces
of a matriarchal system, appropriate to
a society exclusively devoted to the Great
Mother, whom Hellas took in name and
actual primitive form to her pantheon
^ under the names of Rhea and
^. ... ^^. Kybele. The Dorian and
Civilisation t • j^ 1 r 1. .l ^
. Q Ionian styles of architecture
can be directly affiliated to the
i5^gean as revealed in Mycentxan tombs
and Cnossian frescoes, and the Greek
house is a development of the earlier
domestic plan. Certain notable excep-
tions go far to prove the rule. The dress
of the upper class, and the fashion of
body-armour and weapons, seem to have
been determined henceforth by the
new folk. These are just the features
in civilisation which conquering invaders
would naturally introduce and retain.
It is hardly necessary to add that if
JEgesLU civilisation seriously influenced
that of historic Hellas, it seriously
influenced at second hand that of Western
and Central Europe.
Hellenic civilisation, however, was per-
haps not the only medium through which
^gean influence affected inner Europe.
In Scandinavian tomb-furniture certain
presumably foreign decorative motives,
notably the returning spiral and the
triqnetra, which are identical with charac-
teristic i^igean types, make their appear-
ance in the first part of the local Bronze
Age ; and these have been noticed also,
at a slightly later period, in the art of
early Ireland, at that time the most
civilised of the British Isles. In point of
form also some Northern weapons in
bronze resemble those of the Far South.
If the spiral motive stood alone, the
affiliation of this distant decorative art
to the iEgean would be very doubtful,
since Nature, whether through the forms
^ . ^ assumed by vegetable tendrils
Other ^gean ■ i i ii u
, ,, ** or animal horns, or through
Influences , , r t. ■ r j
. „ those ot shavings ot wood or
in Europe ■ . , ... ^ •, ,
metal, might easily have sug-
gested the ornament independently. But
taken together with other related motives,
and the evidence of assimilation of weapon-
forms, these spirals raise a ])resumption
in favour of an early obligation of North
Europe to i^gean civilisation. A ]:)Ossible
explanation of this fact, if fact it be, has
been found in the communication which
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
appears to have been created by the
TEgean demand for Baltic amber ; and
early ways for this traffic have been
traced by Dr. Arthur Evans up the
Adriatic, and also overland from the
iEgean shores to the Danube basin,
whence, from a point near the later
Carnuntum, a combined route ran up the
Moldau to the Elbe system. Further, it
is the opinion of Professor Montelius
and some other archaeologists that not
only certain bronze forms and decorative
motives, but the usage of this metal
itself was derived in Scandinavia from
the south, somewhere before looo B.C.
Since pure copper and pure tin hardly
occur in Sweden among objects of this age,
it has been held that the bronze was
imported ready made in the mass. But
Sweden contains large natural copper
deposits, and tin is also found ; and,
therefore, this opinion is not universally
accepted. Indeed, some authorities reverse
the debt, and actually derive iEgean
knowledge of bronze from Europe. If,
however, the first derivation be ever
proved, we shall have to refer the first
_ . , use of metal weapons — an
Commercial , j- ^ , .
„ . ,. enormous step forward m
Communication . , ^ • at ; i
. , p social progress — m North
and Central Europe to the
Southern civilisations, such as the Egyp-
tian, which had certainly known and used
bronze for at least a thousand years before
we find it in Sweden. It is sometimes main-
tained that Cyprus was the first, and long
the sole, source of copper, which travelled
north by way of Asia Minor and the iEgean
to Hungary and inner Europe ; but this is
not proved. In any case, for some reason,
bronze seems to have become known to
the Scandinavians and Danes earlier than
to the Gallic peoples.
Yet more evidence is there of possible
iEgean communication with Central
Europe after the introduction of iron,
which seems not to have reached Scandi-
navia till almost the Christian Era. Tran-
sylvanian, Russian, and Balkan graves
have yielded to recent explorers abund-
ance of both weapons and decorated
articles of personal use and adornment,
closely resembling fabrics in the later
periods of /Egean civilisation. Further into
the European continent we have again the
various evidence of the early Iron Age
graves of the Salzkammergut on the south-
eastern fringe of the Bavarian plain. This
" Hallstatt " culture, as it is called, from
294
in Western
Europe
the location of the chief cemetery, presents
both in character and development an
extraordinarily close parallel to that of the
iEgean Geometric Age. About the same
period we know also that a civilisation was
in progress in the fertile lands round the
head of the Adriatic, which is called
Veneto-Illyrian, and shows even stronger
, „ evidence of ^Egean influence
Influences ,, ,, tt v ^ j_^ i^
than the Hallstatt culture ; as,
indeed, might be expected, if
it be remembered that in
Southern and Central Italy, as well as
Sicily, forms and decoration, obviously
learned from ^Egean civilisation, as well as
actual imported ^Egean objects, had been
plentiful ever since the bloom of the
iEgean age. A visit to the local collections
in Syracuse, Bari, and Ancona, will estab-
lish this fact to the satisfaction of any
archaeologist. These two civilisations, that
of the Salzkammergut and that of the
North Adriatic lands, have important bear-
ing on the development of all Western
Europe ; for we know that the Celtic
peoples, who penetrated south of the
Alps in the sixth and fifth centuries
B.C., learned much from both, and espe-
cially from the second ; and graves, fur-
nished after they had been pressed back
again into Switzerland and Gaul, show
abundant evidence of what is called " sub-
^gean " influence — that is, of form and
ornament probably derived ultimately from
iEgean culture, but indirectly, or after
undergoing considerable degradation.
Through various subsequent interme-
diaries, notably the Belgic tribes, these
derivatives passed ultimately to our own
islands, and we find their influence opera-
tive on early English art.
At the same time it is necessary to add
that this derivation of the higher develop-
ments of mid-European and Scandinavian
culture in the Bronze and Early Iron ages
from the influence of iEgean civilisation is
far from certain, whatever be the case for
the Adriatic lands. Know-
ledge obtained since Dr.
Evans and Dr. Montelius
first expressed their views,
especially in regard to the so-called Neo-
lithic or " Butmir " pottery, which has a
very wide range in South-Eastern Central
Europe, has not strengthened their case,
but rather tended to suggest that the con-
tinental culture developed independently
to, though in a parallel direction with, that
of the southern peninsulas and isles. If
Civilisations
Help
One Another
THE RISE OF CIVILISATION IN EUROPE
this view ultimately prevail, it will illustrate
the opinion, to which we personally incline,
that the derivation of civilisations, one
from another in early times, is the exception
and not the rule, except in respect of minor
matters.
Two other intermediary civilisations of
the South-east remain to be considered —
the Hittite and the Phoenician. The
first is still, unfortunately, very little
known to us, and we are hardly in a posi-
tion to say much about its influence
on Europe until more small objects of
use and ornament have been discovered
on Hittite sites. The general facts so far
ascertained, which make such influence
probable, are these. This civilisation,
characterised and distinguished from all
others by a very individual art, and by a
system of writing apparently independent
of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian sys-
tems, but in its later development show-
ing kinship to Mediterranean systems, lay
across all the mainland routes from inner
Asia and Egypt to South-eastern Europe.
Its monuments have been found scattered
thickly from the valley of the Syrian
_,. ... Orontes northwards, to within
mtml^°'"°'''-^5° miles of the Black Sea, and
^! ... ,. westward to the last passes
Civilisation i • i , , i r ^i
which lead down trom the
Anatolian plateau to the ^Egean littoral.
So far as we can judge at present, its place
of origin was Cappadocia, but its later
focus was possibly in North Syria ; while
its period of florescence ranges back from
about the sixth century B.C. for at least
a thousand years.
It was, as we know from many writ-
ten records, in frequent collision with
both Egypt and Assyria, and in its
southern home and latest period came
under Mesopotamian domination. As is
to be expected, therefore, its monuments
show very strong Mesopotamian, and less
strong Egyptian, influence. At the last,
indeed, those of North Syria approximate
very closely indeed to the contemporary
Assyrian of the Sargonid Age. At the
same time, however, they retain sufficient
individuality never to be mistaken for
other than Hittite ; they represent facial
types, dress, and fashion of arms which
are peculiar ; and the inscriptions they
bear are always couched in a script
having no relation to cuneiform writing.
This vigorous civilisation, occupying the
great land bridge from Asia into Europe
in the dawn of the historic Hellenic period.
and eminently receptive of Mesopotamian
influences, cannot but have been a
medium through which these reached the
iEgean Sea, and so told on Europe. But
this did not take place to any appreciable
extent in what is known as the prehistoric
period. The Cretan products, and those
of the other ^gean Isles and mainland
Greece, betray very little Meso-
"f'^f... potamian influence, and none
and Hittite li , ui ^ a
, „ that we can reasonably trace to
Influence ., TTi^ .l c r _
the Hittites. So far as we can
see, the ^Egean culture was much more
ancient than the Hittite, and if there was
kinship between them we are bound, on
the evidence, to derive the latter from the
former, and not vice versa. There is a
certain relation between late iEgean art
and products of inland Asia Minor, but it
indicates influence passing eastward rather
than westward ; and even on the remoter
iEgean sites of Asia Minor — Hissarlik, for
instance — non-iEgean traces are but shght,
and do not suggest the influence of
a strong civilisation focused inland.
In the early Hellenic Age, on the other
hand, we have to note considerable Mesopo-
tamian influence on Greek culture, and, at
the same time, certain evidence of counter
influence, both sub-/Egean and Graeco-
Lydian, on Mesopotamia, which is as yet
not fully understood. But whether both or
either of these respective influences were
transmitted through the Hittite civilisation
is still very doubtful. The Egyptian
influence on archaic Anatolia, especially
on Rhodes, and even on the Greek main-
land, seems clearly to have come by way
of the sea ; and considering the part
which the Phoenicians had been playing
for some time previously as transmitters
of things eastern, there is a probable alter-
native westward route for Mesopotamian
influence also. In Cyprus, at any rate, this
influence, which at a certain period has left
strong traces, certainly came for the most
part through the western Semites. The
. claim of the Hittites, however,
The Hittite -^ ^^^ ^^ ^^ denied altogether.
Pathway of t-, • ■ , i i x ji
_. ... ' Iheirscript seems undoubtedly
Civilisation , , i ,, 4. ( ju
to have been the parent 01 Ine
Lycian and other local Anatolian systems.
Phrygian art and writing attest Graeco-
Lydian influence inland ; Ionian culture
was certainly not unaffected by the Lydian
in which many students recognise a western
offshoot of the Hittite ; and there are a
few features in Ionian cult and in cult
representations which seem to be owed
295
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
rather to the rehgious system of the
central plateau than to that native to
the iEgean area. In this state of sus-
pense we must leave the question, adding
only these final remarks, that Greek tra-
dition itself ascribed some of the arts and
luxuries of its civilisation — for example,
the coining of money — to Lydian inven-
P t PI A *^°"' ^'^^ ^^^ affiliated to Lydia
b [h *^^ ^ whole western culture, that
p^ . . of Etruria ; while it is an un°
doubted fact that a Mesopo-
tamian standard of weight-currency
travelled to the ^gean, and thence
affected all western commerce, but by what
channel we do not certainly know. There is
an unknown quantity in all this problem —
viz., Lydia. We have reason to suspect the
latter of a considerable influence on early
Hellenic civilisation, both as creator and
transmitter, but must await further evidence.
The part played by the Phoenicians in
transmitting influences of civilisation from
East to West is far more certain, and is
now much better understood than it was
a few years ago. Much vague exaggera-
tion of it has been swept away by recent
demonstration that there is practically
nothing of probable Phoenician origin in
the remains of the /Egean culture. The
script of the latter is wholly independent ;
the typical Phoenician vehicles of glyptic
art, the cylinder and the scarab, were never
naturalised in the early ^Egean ; the whole
path of the latter's artistic development
was distinct ; and the ^gean religious
representations, once regarded as Semitic,
are now seen to be native. On the other
hand, decadent and derived ^gean forms
and motives appear among the earliest
Phoenician known to us. Influence,
if it jxassed at all, between the ^gcan
and the Syrian coast lands, in the pre-
historic age, moved from west to east.
In short, we now know that the Phoe-
nicians did not begin to spread over the
western sea and influence Europe till
Ori in of *'^^ break up of the i^gean
rigin o civilisation. The Homeric lavs
OurWntten i tt n • ^\ n a J
, and Hellenic myths reflect the
Language . c c ■ ^■
mception of a Semitic ex-
pansion, which must be placed after
iioo B.C. Even in Homer there is more
mention of Greek ships than of Sidonian,
and the Tyrian ])o\vcr is yet to come.
The latter pushed westward later, and
the founding of Carthage, usually dated
in the eighth century, marks its first
great achievement along those distant
296
sea-routes, which certainly the Semites
had been coming to know during a couple
of centuries of huckstering trade, even if
the dependence of the early Hellenes on
Phoenician knowledge of these waters has
been overrated. But, in any case, during
the interval between the fall of ^Egean
power and the rise of the Hellenic maritime
cities these Semites counted for much.
Even in the light of Cretan discovery, we
need not question their responsibility for
the Greek alphabet, and thus, indirectly,
for the ultimate medium of written com-
munication used throughout European
civilisation ; nor need it be doubted that
Hellenic writers, who trace early instruction
in trade and barter to visits of Semitic ships
to their coasts, show real, though limited,
knowledge of fact. Phoenician factories
were certainly established on Greek shores,
and left Semitic forms among later Greek
place-names ; and it is quite possible
that political power was exercised at one
time by Semitic colonists in parts of
Hellas. Sufficient Phoenician art products
have been found on archaic Hellenic sites,
to prove that, in the period between 1000
and 500 B.C., the iEgean coasts
^!"* "^ . were often visited by these
n "^'*" ^"^ Semites. Such objects are espe-
Greek Art • „ • y,, j ^
cially numerous m Rhodes, a
convenient stage on the westward sea route,
and they radiate over not only Ionia and
the Hellenic lands, but also into the further
Mediterranean, to Sicily and its neigh-
bouring islands, to Italy and South Gaul,
and to Sardinia and Spain. Carthage
probably had much to say in their
western distribution.
Of Semitic influence on archaic Greek
art there is considerable evidence. After
the Geometric Age, we find in the Greek
lands pottery and metal-work showing cer-
tain motives and arrangement of decora-
tion foreign to iEgean art, and referable
ultimately to the Mesopotamian and
Egyptian. Such are the animals and
monsters disposed in concentric friezes
and zones on Cypriote bowls, Corin-
thian vases, and the Cretan shields of
the Idaean Cave. But this influence,
strong and undoubted as it was, must
not be over estimated. As the Hellenes
rose to power, their instinct of sincerity
and naturalism, inherited from ^gean
civilisation, revolted against, and
triumphed over, this parasitic Semitic
art, and already in the ninth or eighth
century we find a Gr?eco-Lydian influence,
297
History of the world
which owes nothing to Phoenician, break-
ing back to the east and creating the
ivories of the Sargonid Age at Nineveh.
Phoenician objects thenceforward become
fewer and fewer in Hellenic strata, and
in the sixth century B.C. they virtuahy
vanish. By this time Phoenicia had be-
come a subject country, about to give up
the last ghost of its indepen-
dence to the Greeks them-
No Phoenician
Influence
in Britain
selves, as its western offshoot,
Carthage, was also to surrender
a little later to another civilisation near akin
to the Greek. But, needless to say, the
Semite has had his full revenge for the
short tenure of his earliest predominance
in European waters. The fall of Phoenicia
cleared the way for another Semitic family
to capture international trade, and, first
with one creed and then another, to conquer
the Greeks, the Romans, and the World.
There are, of course, possibilities of
direct Phoenician intercourse with non-
Mediterranean Europe — for example, with
England's south-western coasts ; but they
need not detain us. For whether certain
Semites came to Cornwall in quest of tin
or no, it is certain that by these no
lasting influence of civilisation passed in
to England. Neither the religion, the
speech, nor the script of Britain owed
them anything. Recent scholarship tends
to discredit any Semitic element even in
English south-western place-names.
Such, in brief outline, are the channels
through which the civilisations of the
South-eastern river- valleys could communi-
cate with primitive Europe. It is easier to
l)oint them out than to say exactly what
flowed along them. Seldom can so definite
a debt be recorded as that under which
wc lie to the Semites of Phoenicia, for the
names and the forms of the written
characters which, presumably, they them-
Th o ■ • selves had borrowed from
^ c^ ngms £gyp|.^ ^j^^ modified ere they
Civilisations P^''^^^ them westwards.
Usually the obligation must be
stated much more vaguely, being confined,
as in the case of ^Egean influences, to little
more than a general responsibility for
the spirit, and for many forms of the ex-
pression, of the first great artistic growth
on the mainland soil of Europe, as well as
for certain persistent and dynamic features
in South Euiopean cults.
Thus, it becomes even more apparent
at the end of our discussion than it was
at the beginning that when all has been
said about influences of Egypt and
Mesopotamia, and influences of the inter-
mediate civilisations of the ^Egean, Syria,
and Asia Minor, only a very small part of
the whole story of incipient European
civilisation has been told. Nor is it to be
expected that the origin of our culture
should be capable of being adequately
expressed in terms of other cultures,
developed at a great distance and under
different geographical conditions. Civilisa-
tions, destined to be living growths, spring,
it seems, of themselves, and the debts which
they can incur at the first are very small
and mostly in small things. It is only when
they are come to adult estate, have bred
men of wealth and leisure with open
and receptive minds, and have broken
through the geographical barriers about
them, that they begin to borrow at
large.
One of the intermediate civilisations
of which we have treated, the iEgean,
the only one whose own origins are fairly
well known, offers proof in point. Its
remains indicate but trifling
J*. .. f. , obligations to neighbouring
Childhood '^ ° -
of Europe
Egypt till a very late period,
that which, in Crete, we call the
Third Minoan. Thereafter, in the space
of two or three generations, the
evidence of its debt increases at a
wholly disproportionate rate. So too,
no doubt, in the misty period of the child-
hood of Central and Western Europe,
little was borrowed from abroad that was
essential to civilisation ; and the heavy
obligations which we owe to the Eastern
lands fall in ages much more recent.
They fall, in fact, in those times which
saw the Anatolian cult of Kybele and
Attis, the Egyptian cult of Isis and Horus-
Harpocrates, the Mesopotamian cult of
Mithra, and, far more momentous, of
course, than these, Christianity — Hebrew
in origin if modified by Greek concep-
tions— brought by a greater intermediary
civilisation than any with which we have
had to deal, to the knowledge of inner
European races already long emerged
from savagery, and able and eager to
borrow.
David George Hogarth
298
THE TRIUMPH OF RACE
WHY ONE NATION CONQUERS ANOTHER
BY DR. G. ARCHDALL REID
C
IT is a familiar fact that offspring
resemble their parents on the whole,
but differ from them in details. For
example, the child of a human being is
always another, but never an exactly
similar, human being.
These differences in detail are of two
sorts, inboyn and acquired. Inborn or
innate differences arise " by nature " ;
the child is inherently unlike the parent —
taller or shorter, fairer or darker, and so
forth. Acquired differences, on the other
hand, are due to the conditions under
which parents and children have lived.
Thus, owing to better or worse surround-
ings, the child may develop better or
worse than the parent and so be taller or
shorter, or a greater exposure to weather
may render him darker or fairer.
It was formerly believed by scientific
men, and is still believed by the public,
that traits acquired by the parent
tended to be inherited by the
^XT^^J^ . child — that is, reproduced as
Wc Cannot , , •, Vi, -J.
J . . mborn traits. 1 hus it was sup-
posed that if a man were made
strong by exercise, or injured by accident,
his child would tend to inherit, in some
degree at least, the acquired benefit or
injury, and as a result be naturally stronger
or more defective than the parent was at
the start.
But very prolonged and careful investi-
gation has proved that this is certainly an
error. For example, though for aeons
human beings have been learning to speak
and walk, and make a multitude of other
acquirements, yet none of these are ever
inherited. In fact, owing to the evolution
of memory and the retrogression of
instinct, man, of all animals, acquires the
most and inherits the least. Every child
has to begin afresh and learn what its
ancestors learnt ; all are born ignorant ;
none speak or walk " naturally." Each
starts where the parent began, not where
he left off. The parental traits, if repro-
duced at all, are always of the same kind in
the child as in the parents, and appear in
the same way. That is, the inborn traits
of the parent are always inborn in the
offspring ; the acquired traits are never
anything but acquirements resulting
from the same causes as they did in the
parent. In brief, the acquirements of
the parent are never transmuted into
inborn characteristics in the
child. They are never inherited.
It is admitted on all hands
Acquired
Traits not
^ that inborn differences — varia-
tions, as they are termed technically —
tend to be inherited.
Thus, if the parent is naturally darker
than the grandparent, the child tends in
colour to resemble the former more than
the latter. Since the child may vary from
the parent in the same direction as the
latter varied from the grandparent, these
inborn differences may be accentuated in
subsequent generations. It is due to this
fact that plant and animal breeders have
improved domesticated species.. They
are able to benefit the individual by
improving his surroundings, but the race
they can improve only by breeding from
the best. In other words, when they
have the latter end in view, they must
build on natural variations, not on
acquirements.
One of the most important problems in
the whole range of science is the question
as to what causes offspring to differ in this
inborn, natural way from their parents.
Many theories have been formulated,
and the subject is still to some extent
under discussion ; but the evidence is
overwhelming that variations — natural
, _ ^ differences — are not generally
A Great j , ^ t ^■ -^
Probl caused, as most people believe,
oi\i^Z,ce ^y anything that happens to the
parent before the birth of the
child, but are " spontaneous." The sub-
ject is a large and intricate one, and we
have not space to discuss it at length. One
or two facts, however, may be mentioned.
The members of a litter of puppies,
kittens, or pigs, may differ naturally
amongst themselves and from their parents
299
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
in all sorts of ways — in colour, shape, size,
hairiness, disposition, and so on. One
puppy may present points of resemblance
to the father, another to the mother, a
third to some ancestor, while a fourth may
be unlike any of its predecessors. Since,
practically speaking, the puppies were all
conditioned alike before birth, it is evident
_.„ that these great differences
amor*"*'" "^"^^ ^^ " spontaneous." They
K™°H^ A caimot have been caused by
such things as the good or ill
health of the parents, their food, or the
hfe they led, for, in that case, the puppies
would all have varied in the same way.
Again, malaria is, in effect, a universal
disease on the West Coast of Africa.
Individuals differ naturally in their powers
of resisting it, some taking it lightly and
some severely ; but almost every negro
suffers, and many children perish of it. If
the sufferings of the parents caused children
to be born weaker " by nature," it is
evident that every individual would start
life inferior to his predecessor at the
start, and the race would thus degenerate
and ultimately become extinct. On the
other hand, if variations are " spon-
taneous," if, quite unaffected by the
sufferings of the parents, some children are
born naturally different, naturally more or
less resistant to malaria than their pre-
decessors, it is plain that the weeding out
of the unfittest, the weak against the
disease, would ultimately make the race
resistant to it. In the one case the race
would drift to destruction ; in the other
it would undergo protective evolution.
Obviously, the latter is what has happened.
Negroes show no signs of any kind of
degeneration, but they are of all races the
most resistant to malaria.
Similarly, Enghshmen who have been
much exposed to consumption and measles,
natives of India who have been much
afflicted by enteric fever and dysen-
tery, Esquimaux who have suffered from
. cold, Arabs who have endured
u cring jieat. Chinamen and Jews who
Stren"t" ^'^^^ ^^'^^ dwelt under that
complex of ill conditions found
in slums and ghettos, are none of them
degenerate, but, on the contrary, have
become resistant, each race to its own par-
ticular ill-conditions in proportion to its
sufferings in the past. In fact, it may be
laid down as a general rule that races
strengthen only when exposed to ill con-
ditions, and deteriorate only when the
300
conditions are so favourable that the unfit
are not eliminated. An example of the
latter is seen when prize breeds of animals
and plants, however well nourished and
cared for, are no longer bred with care.
It follows that races, if not exterminated,
are not injured but strengthened by ill
conditions, by the elimination of the un-
fittest, as gold is refined by fire.
It is a remarkable fact that many people
are able to accomplish the surprising feat
of knowing that races have become inured
to ill conditions, and of believing at the
same time that the offspring of people
exposed to such conditions tend, as a rule,
to be degenerate. It is as if they believed
that two and two make four, and two
more six, but that if a great number of
two's are added together the total result
is a minus quantity. Obviously the two
beliefs are incompatible. A race cannot
degenerate in every generation and yet
emerge in the end strengthened from the
struggle. The confusion has arisen because
the two diametrically opposite propo-
sitions are seldom considered together, and
in part also from a mistaken interpretation
of what is observed in such
situations as the slums of cities.
Here puny children are seen to
be derived from puny parents,
and it is assumed that the children are
degenerate because the parents have
suffered.
As a fact we have no reason to doubt that
Ihe children are affected in precisely the
same way as the parents. On the one hand,
slums are sinks into which descend people
naturally inferior, people who have varied
spontaneously from their ancestors in such
a way as to "be feeble, physically or men-
tally, and who reproduce their like. On the
other hand, the conditions are such that
even the naturally strong, both parents and
children, develop badly. Doubtless, owing
to the constant elimination of the unfit,
the latter — the naturally strong— are by
far the more numerous. There is nothing
to show that, if they were removed in early
life to better surroundings, they would not
develop just as well as the offspring of
country folk.
The fact that races grow resistant to the
ill conditions to which they are exposed,
and degenerate when placed under par-
ticularly good conditions, is decisive proof
that offspring are not, as a rule, innately
affected by the surroundings of their
parents. No doubt exceptions occur, but
Survival
of the
Fittest
THE TRIUMPH OF RACE
these are amongst the most unfit, and the
race is soon purged of them. Thus Euro-
pean dogs are said to degenerate when
taken to India. But the existence of old-
estabhshed native races of dogs is
proof that the degenerative process is not
perpetual. Malaria and many other ill
conditions are quite normal parts of the
environment of the races ex-
„ . so for thousands of years.
now Ceased t- , r • i
bxcept for occasional un-
favourable variations, which are quickly
eliminated, they have long purged
the races of those strains that tended
to become degenerate under their
influence.
After man — through the evolution of
the structures and faculties which distin-
guish him from the lower animals, the large
brain, with its accompanying memory,
the organs of speech, the hand, the erect
attitude — had achieved the conquest of
the earth, his selection and evolution along
the ancestral lines gradually diminished,
and has now almost ceased. At the pre-
sent day clever, strong, or active people
do not on the average have an appreciably
more numerous progeny than those who
are not exceptionally endowed. No modern
race is intellectually superior to the Greeks
who flourished more than two thousand
years ago. The brains, the hands, the
organs of speech, the erect attitude,
have not altered. Apparently nothing
more than traditional knowledge has
improved.
The gradual accumulation of traditional
knowledge during prehistoric times en-
abled man to cultivate animals and plants,
and so to increase and regulate his supply
of food. As a consequence his numbers
multiplied. Areas of country which for-
merly supported only a few wandering hun-
ters now afforded sustenance to growing
multitudes of agriculturists, who often
dwelt together for mutual protection
in villages. Commerce followed agricul-
ture, towns and cities arose, and civflisa-
tion dawned.
Civilisation implies a dense and settled
community, protected from most . of the
dangers which beset wild animals, and in
which, therefore, the elimination of the
unfit is no longer of the kind that weeded
out the brute and the utter savage. Some
sort of elimination does occur, however,
for, even in the most civilised states, mul-
titudes of people perish in youth, before
they have contributed their full quota of
offspring to the race.
We have excellent opportunities of
studying this elimination and noting
whether it results in evolution. Indeed,
man presents the only instance in
Nature in which we are able to observe
natural selection actually at
work. In all modern states
statistics are compiled which
set out the causes of death, the
mortality from each cause, and the ages of
its victims. By comparing races which have
been much afflicted by this or that cause
of mortality with races that have been little
or not at all affected, we are able to ascer-
tain the resulting racial change, if any. As
may be noted by everyone, civilised people
perish, with rare exceptions, of disease.
Natural
Selection
at Work
MANKIND'S LONG BATTLE AGAINST BACTERIA
YV/E have just seen that every race is
^ resistant to every disease precisely
in proportion to its past experience of it.
It follows that the evolution of civilised
. peoples is against disease. If
Resistance ^^^^^ j^j^^ ^^ evolution is
of Races •' ,
_. now occurnng, no one as yet
has been able to demonstrate
it, though many unproved guesses have
been made. Mere alterations in traditional
knowledge is not evolution. Children may
derive it just as well from other people
as from their parents.
The vast majority of deaths from disease
are of zymotic origin. A zymotic or
microbic disease is caused by the entrance
into the body of minute animals or plants
(microbes), which find their nutriment
there. There are many species of microbes,
each disease being due to one. Some
species are mainly air-borne, and infect
through the breath ; others are water-
borne ; others earth-borne ; yet others
insect-borne ; while a few pass by actual
contact from an infected to a healthy
person.
Some diseases — for example, consump-
tion and leprosy — are of indefinite but
always prolonged duration ; others, like
measles, are short and sharp. In the case
of the latter, for reasons we need not dwell
on here, the body after an attack becomes,
for a longer or shorter time, an unfit habi-
tation for the microbes of that particular
301
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
The Way
Disease
is Spread
the like-
species. The rapid recovery which occurs
in these " acute " diseases, indeed, imphes
the banishment of the microbes. The air-
borne diseases — measles, influenza, small-
pox, and the like, all of that acute type
which confers immunity against subse-
quent attacks — are very infective, spread-
ing through a susceptible population with
great rapidity. Under favour-
able conditions the water-
borne diseases also — cholera,
dysentery, enteric fever, and
may spread very quickly. Chief
amongst the earth-borne diseases is con-
sumption. It is contracted chiefly in such
dark, ill-ventilated, and crowded houses
as are built by the inhabitants of cold and
temperate climates.
The disease-producing microbes are an
infinitesimal proportion of the total num-
ber of bacterial and protozoan species. In
Nature it is not easy to find a speck
of earth or a drop of water from which
these minute living beings are absent.
All decay, by means of which the
dead bodies of plants and animals are
returned to the soil, is due to them.
It is a safe assumption that the microbes
of human diseases have evolved from non-
parasitic species. The niche they now
occuj)y in Nature is the human body. Two
things formed essential parts of this evolu-
tion— first, the microbes became capable of
existing and multiplymg for a shorter or
longer period in the body ; secondly, they
evolved means of passing from one living
body to another. The latter must have
been the more difficult process. Under
favourable circumstances several species
of microbes — for example, those of putre-
faction, which are ordinarily non-parasitic
— are capable of entering the human body
and becoming virulent ; but, since they
cannot secure passage from one individual
to another, they die out, and their viru-
lence is lost. Historical evidence renders
it probable that all known human diseases
-,. , are of immense antiquity,
The Immense .1 ,, j i- -^
Anti uit so-called new diseases
orDil^eaLs ^^^"^^ merely newly-observed
diseases. It appears probable,
therefore, that, owing to constant perse-
cution by disease, by continued survival of
the fittest, humanity has grown so resistant
that no species of microbe which has not
undergone concurrent evolution is now
able to establish itself as a regular parasite.
Obviously, since the microbes of human
diseases draw their nutritive supplies from
302
man, they cannot persist except amongst
populations so crowded that they are able
to pass from one individual to another in
unending succession. When the succession
fails, the disease dies out, and is not
renewed, except from foreign sources.
Microbic disease is never contracted in
desert places far from human settlements,
and even in modern times it is compara-
tively rare amongst nomadic tribes, and,
seemingly, was quite unknown in Arctic
regions and in many Pacific islands before
its introduction by Europeans. These
maladies, therefore, must have made their
appearance only after men had peopled
certain regions in considerable numbers,
On the other hand, we have no certain
evidence that any well-established para-
sitic disease has ever completely died out.
The chances are all against such an occur-
rence in the past. When once established as
parasites, the microbes, owing to the
constant growth of human population,
found a constantly augmented food supply,
and therefore constantly increased oppor-
tunities of reaching fresh fields of con-
quest. Sanitary science is still in its
infancy. Preventive measures,
and perhaps other agencies,
have caused the disappear-
ance of leprosy from several
countries, but it is still prevalent in many
quarters of the globe. Contagious diseases
have spread very widely. Earth and air
borne diseases have become endemic
instead of merely epidemic. Consumption
is always with us, and almost every
child contracts measles, whooping-cough,
chicken-pox, and common cold. Small-pox
has been replaced by vaccination, which is
merely modified small-pox. Malaria has
spread but little during the historic epoch,
but only because its microbes were already
])resent in almost every place where the
mosquitoes that convey it are able to exist.
All our information indicates the Eastern
Hemisphere as the place of origin both of
man and of his microbic diseases. Parts
of it have been inhabited by a dense
and settled population from a time im-
mensely remote. " Behind dim empires
ghosts of dimmer empires loom." Beyond
the traces of the oldest civilisations we find
evidences of primitive agricultural com-
munities, and far beyond these the remains
of the cave-men and hunters of the
Stone Age. Even a race of hunters tends
to increase faster than the food supply.
Doubtless the pressure of population in
Progress
of Sanitary
Science
THE DAYS OF THE PLAGUE IN LONDON
Dr. Archdall Reid, in his essay on race supremacy, explains tliat the evolution of civilised peoples is against disease,
and that, therefore, the age of pestilence and plague is passing. This picture of an incident in the greatest plague
that has affected London in historical times— in the year 1655 — is from the painting- by F. W, Topham, R.L
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
the Old World led to the colonisation of the
New. But even in the New World there are
signs of a civilisation so ancient that some
authorities have placed its beginnings as far
back as a score or more of thousands of years.
With the exception of malaria, it is extremely
doubtful whether any zymotic disease ex-
isted in the whole of the New World at
the time of its discovery by Columbus.
The subject is involved in obscurity;
but, while it is evident that the European
adventurers introduced many diseases,
there is no clear indication that they
found and brought back one. Appa-
rently all the diseases which have been
prevalent in Europe and America during
the last four hundred years were preva-
lent in the former continent before the
fifteenth century. Venereal disease and
yellow fever have sometimes been regarded
as exceptions. But the former was well
known to the Roman physicians, and was
common during the ^Middle Ages. Moreover,
the inhabitants of the New World take the
disease in a very acute form, and it is not
found in remote communities to which
Europeans have had no access. Yellow
fever was first noted with certainty in
the West Indies in the middle of the
seventeenth century. The records of the
time " tell of the importation of the
disease from place to place, and from
island to island."
Not till more than a century later
was it observed on the West Coast of
. . Africa. There can be no doubt,
rigins however, that the earlier ob-
... servers confused yellow fever
with bilious malaria, and that it
was present both in the West Indies
and Africa long before a differential
diagnosis was made. The fact that of all
races negroes are most resistant to the
disease would seem to indicate West Africa
as the place of origin. In any case, it is
certain that, with the exception of malaria,
zymotic diseases, if not entirely absent,
were extremely rare in the New World.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE NATIVE RACES
ZYMOTIC disease, then, arose amongst
^- the slowly-growing populations of the
Old World. Air and insect borne diseases
may have arisen amongst the early hunters
and nomads. Similar fo ms of disease,
murrains as they were anciently termed —
for example, distemper, rinder-
Vi ^* ° pest, the horse sickness in South
. ^p' *" . Africa, the rabbit plague in
a s s 1 n g ?sjQj.^]^gj.j^ Canada, and the cattle
fever in Texas — occur among lower ani-
mals, when these are present in considerable
numbers. With the exception of tubercu-
losis and leprosy, endemic disease was
))robably almost unknown in the sjnrsely-
j)eopled ancient world. The facts that
air and water borne diseases spread very
rapidly, that the illnesses caused by them
are comjmratively short and sharp, and
that recovery is followed by immunity,
must have caused rapid exhaustion of the
food supply of the microbes. Under such
conditions the persistence of the patho-
genic species was maintained among the
scanty populations by a passage to new
and perhaps very distant sources of supply.
Introduced by travellers, or si-)reading
from tribe to tribe, they appeared suddenly
in epidemic form as plagues and pesti-
lences, and, disaj:)pearing as suddenly, were
not known again ^ill a fresh generation
furnished a fresh supply of food.
304
When, however, in spite of war, famine,
and pestilence, the human race increased
to such an extent that the number of
fresh births furnished a perennial supply
of food, while at the same time a rising
civilisation and improved means of com-
munication lessened the isolation of various
communities, then many diseases slowly
passed from an epidemic to an endemic
form. Pestilence grew rare, but every in-
dividual was exposed to infection, and,
during youth, either perished from, or
acquired inmiunity against, the more
jwevalent forms of disease.
When endemic, zymotic disease — at
any rate, disease against which immunity
can be acquired — is far less terrible than
when epidemic. Modern examples of
ancient ejiidemics may be seen in isolated
regions. In Pacific islands, for example,
air-borne disease spreads like
ff^.^^ . aflame. The whole community
a National . • , , t-. • ,
_ IS Stricken down. Ihe sick
courge ^^^ left untended and i)erish in
multitudes. The entire business of the
community is neglected, and famine
frequently follows. Under such conditions
measles or whooping-cough, diseases wliich
we in England are accustomed to regard
as scarcely more than nuisances, may rise
to the level of a great national disaster.
Thus, in 1749, 30,000 natives perished of
THE TRIUMPH OF RACE
measles on the banks of the Amazon.
In 1829 half the population died in
Astoria. In 1846 measles committed
frightful ravages in the Hudson Bay
territory. More recently a quarter of the
total inhabitants was swept away in the
Fiji group of islands.
At the dawn of history, long after
the evolution of zymotic disease, the
„ .^ . population of the Eastern
oanitation It ■ 1 x-n i
. _ ^. Hemisphere was still sparse and
p . scattered. Even as late as
the Norman Conquest that of
England was barely two millions — about
one-third of the number now present in
London. Means of communication were
poor and beset by dangers. A journey
from York to London was then a more
serious affair than a journey from London
to San Francisco to-day. Water and air
borne diseases were, therefore, absent
during long periods of time. When they
came they spread as epidemics. According-
ly we read of plague and pestilence ; of
diseases suddenly becoming epidemic and
sweeping away a fourth or half of entire
communities. Historians are apt to
attribute these immense catastrophes
partly to the bad sanitation of the period
and partly to diseases which have died
out of the world, or, at any rate, out of
Europe. Doubtless they are right in a
few instances. But, apart from diseases
which spread under special circumstances
from tropical centres, bad sanitation,
under modern conditions of intercom-
munication and crowding, tends to render
water-borne disease endemic, not epi-
demic. Over air-borne disease it has no
effect. Measles, whooping-cough, chicken-
pox, influenza, common cold, and small-
pox (in a modified form) are as common
as ever.
The character of these ancient epi-
demics, their special symptoms as indi-
cated in old literature, their sudden and
portentous apj^earance, which men attri-
buted to the wrath of God,
..*f^"w *!. their tremendous infectivity and
the Wrath ■, j .1 • n
fG d" rapid spread, their equally
sudden and complete departure
as of Divine anger assuaged, point rather
to air and water borne diseases of the
types now endemic and comparatively
harmless among us, but still so fearful
in their effects on isolated communities.
Like the light flashed from a child's
mirror on a darkened wall, so they
flickered and swept forwards and back-
wards from end to end of the Old World —
from the Malay Peninsula to the North
Cape of Norway, from Kamschatka to
the south point of Africa. A parallel may
be found in the recent epidemic of rinder-
pest amongst the herbivorous animals of
Africa. Years might pass, old men might
remember, the peoples might sacrifice to
their gods ; but when a fresh generation
of those who knew not the disease had
arisen, when the harvest of the non-
immune was ripe and ready, the diseases
would return to the dreadful reaping.
Behind them the earth was heaped with
the dead, and the few and stricken survi-
vors grubbed for roots to satisfy their
hunger. To-day sanitation has nearly
abolished water-borne diseases, and, in
a population largely immune, epidemics
of air-borne disease, like a light thrown
on a sunht wall, are but faint shadows
of that which they were in their old days
of awful power.
The progress of consumption was
different ; it was never truly epidemic.
Owing to its low infectivity, to its hnger-
ing nature, to the fact that no immunity
g could be acquired against it,
/_ . ,. it did not SDread suddenly when
of Resisting r , ■ . ' j j t..-^ 1
Power ■'' introduced, but when
once established its virulence
did not abate within measurable time.
In other words, it was endemic from the
beginning. It made its home in the
hovels of the early settlers on the land. In
such situations— as in Polynesian villages
— modern Englishmen do not take the
disease. But their remote ancestors were
more susceptible ; they could be infected
by a smaller dose of the bacilli. Gradually,
as civilisation advanced, the conditions
grew more stringent ; men gathered into
larger and denser communities, into
hamlets and villages in which they built
houses ill lighted and worse ventilated.
With the rise of towns, and ultimately
of great cities, the stringency of selection
continually increased ; and with it, step
by step, the resisting power of the race.
To-day Englishmen dwell under condi-
tions as impossible to their remote ances-
tors as to the modern Red Indians. In fact,
no race, especially in cold and temperate "
climates, is now able to achieve civilisation,
to dwell in dense communities, unless it has
previously undergone evolution against
tuberculosis. But of this m.ore anon.
So during the long sweep of the ages
microbic diseases strengthened their hold
305
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
on the inhabitants of the Eastern Hemi-
sphere, who in turn slowly evolved powers
of resistance. In like manner antelopes
grew swift and wild sheep active when
j)ersecuted by beasts of prey. Then,
when the germs of disease were rife in
every home and thick on the garments of
ev'ery man, there occurred the greatest
event in human history, the vastest
tragedy. Columbus, sailing across an
untracked ocean, discovered the Western
Hemisphere. The long separation between
the inhabitants of tlie East and West
ended. The diseases of the Old World
burst with cataclysmal results on the New.
The ancient condition of the Eastern
Hemisphere was reproduced in the West.
Again we read of plague and pestilence,
of water-borne and air-borne diseases
coming and going in great epidemics, and
of the famines that followed. Measles
and cholera piled the earth with the dead.
The part played by small-])ox was even
greater. When taken to the West Indies
in 1507 whole tribes were exterminated.
A few years later it quite depopulated
San Domingo. In Mexico it destroyed
three and a half millions of
3,500.000 people. Prescott describes
Destroyed by f, ■ ^ r , r ,1 j
c ,, this first fearful epidemic as
Small-pox ., xi 1 J Ti
sweeping over the land like
fire over the prairies, smiting down ])rince
and peasant, and leaving its path strewn
with the dead bodies of the natives, who —
in the strong language of a contemporary —
perished in heaps like cattle stricken wjth
murrain." In 1841 Catlin wrote of the
United States : " Thirty millions of white
men are now scufHing for the goods and
luxuries of life over the bones of twelve
millions of red men, six millions of whom
have fallen victims to small-pox."
But the principal i)art was played by
tuberculosis. Air-borne and water-borne
diseases generally left an immune remnant,
but against tuberculosis no immunity
could be acquired. Red Indians and
Caribs could not in a few generations
achieve an evolution which the inhabi-
tants of the Old World had accomplished
only after thousands of years, and at the
cost of hundreds of millions of lives.
Civilisation, which imjilit^s a dense and
settled community with cities and towns,
had suddenly i)ecome a necessity, but
remained an impossibility to all tlie
inhabitants of the temperate parts of the
West. It is a highly significant fact that
throughout the New World no city or
306
town has its native quarter, whereas
every European settlement in Asia and
Africa has its native suburbs. The
aborigines of the New World are found
only in remote or inaccessible parts.
The following is an example of the
manner in which tuberculosis went to
work : " The tribe of Hapaa is said to
have numbered some four hun-
s^"^ dred when the smallpox came
.. * pf^** and reduced them by one-
fourth. Six months later, a
woman developed tubercular consumption ;
the disease spread like fire about the valley,
and in less than a year two survivors, a
man and a woman, fled from the newly-
created solitude. . . . Early in the
year of my visit, for example, or late in
the year before, a first case of phthisis
appeared in a household of seventeen
persons, and by the end of August,
when the tal^ was told to me, one soul
survived, a boy who had been absent
on his schooling."
The Caribs of the West Indies are
alm.ost extinct. The Red Indians are
going fast, as are the aborigines of cold
and temperate South America. The Tas-
manians have gone. The Australians and
the Maoris are but a dwindling remnant.
As surely as the trader with his clothes,
or the missionary with his church and
schoolroom appears, the work of exter-
mination begins on Polynesian islands.
Throughout the whole vast extent of the
New World the only pure aboiigines who
seem destined to persist are those which
live remote in mountains or in the depths
of fever-haunted forests, where the white
man is unable to build the towns and
cities with which he has studded the
cooler and more " healthy " regions of
the north and south.
Many explanations, or pseudo-exj)lana-
tions, have been offered to account for
the disapi)earance of the natives. We are
told that they cannot endure " domestica-
tion," that they " pine like
aces a caged eaeles " in confinement,
Decline before ., , .1 i 1 11
the Whites ^'.^^. . ^^f: ^'^'-^"f p;;"^^"^^fV^y
civilisation makes tliem inler-
tile, as the change produced by ca])tivity
makes .some wild animals infertile, and so
forth. But the only ]ieoples who are disap-
pearing are those of the New World, some of
whom were b no means savage. In Asia
and Africa are many tribes far lower in the
scale of civilisation who have persisted in
constant communication with dense and
THE EVE OF "THE VASTEST TRAGEDY IN HISTORY": COLUMBUS SIGHTING AMERICA
"The greatest event and the vastest tragedy in human history" is Dr. Archdall Raid's striking description
of the discovery of America by Cohimbus. It ended the long separation between the inhabitants of
East and West, and the diseases of the Old World burst with cataclysmal results upon the New. The
picture, by George Harvey, shows Columbus approaching America, his rebellious crew pleading for pardon.
settled communities from time immemorial.
Notwithstanding all that has been written,
the people of the New World do not
wither away mysteriously when brought
into contact with the white man. They
die as other men do of violence, or famine,
or old age, or disease. But deaths from
all these causes, except the last, are now
comparatively lare amongst them — much
rarer than formerly during the time of
their perpetual wars. The vast majority
die of imported diseases — exactly the
same diseases as white men die of. But
their mortality is invariably much higher
than that of white men, and they perish
on an average at a younger age.
All this is not mere hypothesis. It can
be proved by reference to carefully col-
lected and tabulated statistics published
by every department of Public Health in
America, Australasia, and Polynesia. The
cause of the sterility cannot be demon-
strated with the same precision ; but it is
hardly necessary to invent fanciful causes
when a reasonable one is to hand. The
high mortality indicates a high sick-rate,
and presumably illness is as much a
cause of sterility in the New World as
in the Old, among savages as among
civilised people.
The Spanish conquest of the West Indies
was followed by the swift disappearance
of the natives. To that end the Spaniards
unconsciously adopted the most effectual
means possible. They satisfied their greed
by forcing the natives to labour in planta-
tions and in mines, and their religious
enthusiasm by compelling attendance in
churches and cathedrals. In other words,
they placed the natives under conditions
the most favourable for acquiring the
diseases which they imported by every
vessel. When the native population
dwindled, it was replaced by negro slaves
from West Africa.
The history of negro migrations is
extremely interesting and illuminating.
There are no accounts of negro conquest
outside the limits of Africa, but from very
ancient times a constant stream of slaves
307
History of the world
has passed to Southern Europe and Asia,
where they have been employed mainly
in domestic service, and in more modern
times to America, where their occupation
has been mainly agricultural. The in-
vasion of Asia has continued to our own
day. But one may search from Spain to
the Malay peninsula and, except in
... _. recent importations, find
Africans Die i ' r
scarcely a trace of a negro
J^. "r ,. ancestry. Yet slaves, like
Civilisation ^.i i li x
cattle, are valuable property,
more cheaply bred than imported. In
Eastern countries they have often been
kindly treated, and many have attained
to wealth and power. Like tlie African
soldiers in Ceylon, of whom it is recorded
that, though many thousands were im-
ported by the Dutch and English, hardly
d descendant survives, all perished in a few
generations, the elimination of the unfit
being so stringent as to cause extinction,
not evolution. A permanent colony of
native Africans in the midst of an
ancient consumption-infested civihsation
is impossible.
The fate of the negro- migrations into
America has been different. The race
•had undergone some evolution against
consumi)tion in Africa, and, therefore, was
more resistant than the vanishing abori-
gines. In its new home, employed in
agriculture in a hot climate where white
men and tubercle bacilli, also recent
importations, were as yet few in numbers,
it was placed under the best conditions
possible. Gradually, as the stringenc ■ of
selection waxed, it evolved resisting
power. To-day, American negroes are able
to dwell even in Northern cities, though it
is said " every other adult negro dies of con-
sumption." After the discovery ot America
the principal maritime races of Western
Europe competed for its possession. S])ain
and Portugal, then powerful nations, had
the first start in the race, and chose the
seemingly richer tropics. But the forests
of the centre and south were defended by
malaria, which raised a barrier against
immigration, and by heat and light,
which raised a barrier against tubercu-
losis. Moreover, the Spaniards and the
Portuguese intermarried freely with the
aborigines, and the mixed race which
resulted inherits in half measure the
resisting power of both stocks. At the
present day this mixed race, with a
leavening of mulattoes, pure Spaniards,
Portuguese, and negroes, inhabits the
cities and more civilised parts. Even in
tropical America the pure aborigines are
found, speaking generally, only
^ **! ° , beyond the verge of civilisa
Natives of -^ — - ° - -
America
tion. Farther south the dis-
appearance of the natives lias
been more complete, and the cooler,
healthier, and more open pampas are settled
by a race more purely European.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PEOPLES
HTHE weaker British and French were
* shouldered into the seemingly inhos-
pitable north. But the British won the
battle of Quebec, and the French immigra-
tion soon ceased. That little fight is half
forgotten, but it is doubtful if any battle
in history had results half so important.
It placed all North America in the grasp
of the Anglo-Saxon, and gave his race
enormous sj)ace for expansion. Unchecked
by malaria, the new-comers
xpansion gathered into communities and
° * „ built towns and cities such as
ng o- axon jj^^^^.^ y^jjjf.)^ across the .\tlantic
were the homes of tuberculosis. The
cold forced them to admit little air and
light into their dwellings. The aborigines
melted away from the borders of the
settlements. Under the conditions there
was little intermarriage. In that chmate
Indian women, and even half-caste chil-
dren, could not exist within stone walls.
308
The few white men who took native
wives preserved them only while living
a wild life remote from their kin.
The British conquest of North America
and Australasia resembles the Saxon con-
quest of Great Britain. The natives have
been exterminated within the area of
settlement. It is in sharp contrast to
their conquests in Asia and Africa. Both
in the Old World and in the New the sub-
jugation of the natives was accompanied
by many wars and much bloodshed, and
piobably the conflicts in the former were
more prolonged and destructive than
those in the latter. But in no part of the
Old World have the British exterminated
the natives. They do not supj^lant them ;
they merely govern them. Southern Asia
and East and West Africa are defended by
• malaria. The British cannot colonise
them, and the natives have undergone
such evolution against tuberculosis that
WHERE THE ANGLO-SAXON RACE OBTAINED POSSESSION OF NORTH AMERICA
On the Plains of Abraham, outside Quebec, the British and French troops fought in 1759, and the battle placed all
North America in the grasp of the Anglo-Saxon, giving his race enormous space for expansion. It is doubtful, says
Dr. Archdall Reid, if any battle in history had results half so important as this, although it is half forgotten
they are capable of resisting the hard con-
ditions imposed by modern civilisation. In
South Africa, where there is little malaria,
Europeans share the land with the natives,
but the latter are likely to remain in an
overwhelming majority.
If history teaches any lesson with
clearness it is this — that conquest, to be
permanent, must be accompanied with
extermination, otherwise in the fulness
of time the natives expel or absorb the
conquerors. The Saxon conquest of
England was permanent ; of the Norman
conquest there remains scarcely a trace.
The Huns and the Franks founded perma-
nent empires in Europe ; the Roman
Empire, and that of the Saracens in
Spain, soon tumbled into ruins. It is
highly improbable, therefore, that the
British will retain their hold on their Old
World dependencies. A handful of aliens
cannot for ever keep in subjugation large
and increasing races that yearly become
more intelligent and insistent in their
demands for self-government. But no
probable conjunction of circumstances
can be thought of that will uproot the
Anglo-Saxons from their wide possession
in the New World. The wars of extermina-
tion are ceasing with the spread of civilisa-
tion. We have ransacked the world, and
now know every important disease.
Diseases cannot come to us as they came
to our forefathers and to the Red Indians,
like visitations from on high. All the
diseases that are capable of travelling have
very nearly reached their limits ; the
rest we are able to check. Even in the
unlikely event of a new disease arising, it
would affect other races equally. Canada
and Australasia, like the United States,
may separate from the parent stem, but
the race will persist. If ever a New
Zealander broods over the ruins of London,
he will be of British descent.
The natural history of man is, in effect,
a history of his evolution against disease.
The story unfolded by it is of greater
proportions than all the mass of trivial
gossip about kings and queens and the
accounts of futile dynastic wars and
stupid religious controversies which fill
so large a space in his written political
history. In the latter, as told by historians,
groping in obscurity and blinded by their
own preconceptions, men and events are
often distorted out of all proportions.
A clever but prejudiced writer may pass
base metal into perpetual circulation as
gold. Luther and the Reformation are
accepted as Divine by many people ;
they are reviled as diabolical by more.
309
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Cromwell was long regarded as accursed ;
to-day he is half-deitied. How many of
us are able to decide, on grounds of fact,
not of fiction, whether the Roman Empire
perished because the Romans, becoming
luxurious, sinned against our moral code,
as ecclesiastic historians would have us
believe, or because a disease of intoler-
ance and stupidity clouded
a ura ^j^^ clear Roman brain and
IS ory enfeebled the strong Roman
of Mankind , , /^■^ ^ P i i
hand, as Gibbon would have us
think ? But the natural history of man
deals, without obscurity and without uncer-
tainty, with greater matters. Study it, and
the mists clear away from much even of
political history. We see clearly how little
the conscious efforts of man have influenced
his destiny. We see forces unrecognised,
enormous, uncontrolled, uncontrollable,
working slowly but mightily towards tre-
mendous conclusions — forces so irresistible
and unchanging that, watching them, we
are able even to forecast something of the
future.
The mere political results of man's evolu-
1 ion against disease are of almo >t incalculable
rnagnitude. The human races of one half
of the world are dying, and are being re-
placed by races from the other half. Not all
the wars of all time taken together con-
stitute so great a tragedy. A quite dis-
proportionate part in this great movement
has been borne by our own race. It has
seized on the larger part of those regions
in which the aborigines were incapable of
civilisation, because incapable of resisting
consumption, and we.'e undefended by
malaria. In the void created by disease
it has more room to spread and multi])ly
than any other race.
Other races may dream of foreign
conquests, but the time for founding
permanent empires is past. There
remains for them only temporary con-
quest, in a few malarious parts of the
world in which Europeans cannot flourish
... . and supplant the natives.
Disease is c • j n i i i i.
w •..• .1. Spain and Portugal lost
Mightier than , A ■ i i u xu
th Sw d their opportunity when they
turned from the temperate
regions and chose the tropics. France lost
her opportunity on the Heights of Abra-
ham. Germany is more than a century too
late in the start. Russia can conquer only
hardy aliens who will multii)ly under her
rule and ultimately assert their suj)remacy.
In times now far remote in the history
of civilised peoples, the sword was the
310
principal means for digging deep the
foundations of permanent empires. Its
place was taken by a more efficient
instrument. A migrating race, armed
with a new and deadly disease, and with
high powers of resisting it, possesses a
terrible weapon of offence. But now
disease has spread over the whole world
and so is losing its power of building
empires. The long era of the great
migrations of the human race, of the
great conquests, is closing fast.
It is generally supposed by historians
and others that races that disappear before
the march of civilisation are mentally
unfitted for it. The assumption is not
supported by an iota of real evidence. To
be mentally incapable a race must be of very
defective memory. Recently a school of
Australian natives, who belong to one of
the " lowest " of races, took the first place
in the colony. Negroes occupy a very
inferior position in America, especially
in Anglo-Saxon territories. But they
are stamped by glaring physical differ-
ences, are treated with great contempt
and jealousy by the whites, and their
acquired mental attitudes,
therefore, do not develop
under good conditions. It
is very possible that they are
mentally inferior to the whites ; but not
so inferior as is commonly believed.
Russian peasants, though not sharply
differentiated by physical peculiarities
from the governing classes, are equally
scorned by them, and show a mental
develojmient hardly, if at all, superior to
the negroes of United States. The Latins
of South America seem very incapable of
orderly government, but they are the heirs
of a civilisation older than our own. At
any rate, while it is conceivable the
American negroes and some other races
are incapable of building up a highly-
enlightened society by their own efforts, it
is manifest that they are able to persist and
niultiply when civilised conditions are im-
posed on them. Not so the aborigines
of the New World, some of whom — for
example, the Maoris and the Polynesians —
are admittedly of good mental type. They
perish swiftly and helplessly of bodily
ailments.
Very clearly, then, human races are
capable or incapable of civilisation, not
because they are mentalh^ but because
they are physically, fit or unfit.
G. Archdall Reid
Possibilities
of the
Black Races
AN ALPHABET OF RACES
BEING A HANDY DICTIONARY OF MANKIND
BY W. E. GARRETT FISHER
AN attempt is made in these pages to
compile a dictionary of the main
existing races of the world, arranged in
ali)habetical order. The accompanying
Etlinological Chart on page 352, will
enable the reader to see at a glance the
relationship of the varions main divisions,
families, and stocks under which these
races are distributed. The Dictionary and
the Chart, if used in conjunction, will
thus supply information about any race
named in the list, and will tell the
inquirer to what branch of the human
race it belongs. It is obviously impossible
to m.ake the Dictionary inclusive of every
tiny and out-of-the-way tribe of Africa or
South America, but all important races
are included. If the reader wants to know
something about the Abyssinians, he will
look them up in the Dictionary, and find
that they are ])artly Semitic Himyarites,
Ababua. A tribe of Sudanese negroes in
Cintral Africa. See Wf.lle Group.
Abaka. See Nilitic Group.
Abkhasians. A Western Caucasian tribe
occu])yinfj the Black Sea coast from Pitzunta
to Mingrelia, akin to Circassians (q.v.).
Abo, or Ibo. See Nigerian Group.
Abors. An Assamese tribe in the Brahmaputra
VaUey, belonging to the Tibetan branch of the
Southern Alongolic family- Wild jungle-dwellers.
Absarakas. See Siouan.
Abukaya. A negro tribe in the Sudan. See
Nilitic Group.
Abunda. A settled and fairly civilised race
of I5antu Negroes, occupying the seaboard and
inland districts of Portuguese West Africa, south
of Ainbriz.
Abyssinians. A mixed race of Hamitic,
Semitic, and Negro stock, inhabiting Abyssinia
(from Arabic liabns/ii — mixed). The main racial
element — Abyssinians proper — consists of brown-
skinned Semitic Himyarites, who probably emi-
grated from Arabia in prehistoric times, and
profess themselves descended from the Queen of
Sheba. Since the sixteenth century Abyssinia
has been over-run by the Hamitic Gallas (q.v.),
who have largely mingled their blood with this
older clement. There is also a considerable
admixture of Sudanese Negro blood. Since the
fourth century the religion of Abyssinia has been
a corrupt form of Christianity ; the mediaeval
myth of Prester John perhaps relates to this fact.
Acadians. French settlers of seventeenth
century in Nova Scotia.
partly Hamitic Gallas, etc. The Chart
will then show him that the Hamitic and
Semitic families belong to the great
Caucasic Division of mankind, that the
Himyarites are one of the main stocks of
the Semitic family, and that the Gallas
belong to the Eastern branch of the
Hamitic family. The student should
familiarise himself with the names and
places of the families and chief stocks of
mankind, as given in the Chart, and so
greatly facilitate the task of reference.
The intention of both Chart and Dictionary
is, of course, to serve as a kind of index
to the History proper, which must be
consulted for further information. As far
as can be discovered, no previous attempt
has been made to summarise the con-
clusions of modern ethnology in this
convenient form. The illustrations depict
some of the most interesting races.
Achseans. See Argives
Achinese. A warlike Malay race of Sumatra,
long at war with the Dutch colonists.
Accras. See Ga.
Achuas, or Wochua. A pygmy Negrito race,
well-proportioned, though dwarfish, inhabiting
the forests of the \\'elle and Aruwimi districts
in Central Africa, and living by hunting.
Adamawa Group. A group of Sudanese Negro
tribes inhabiting the district of the Upper Benue
in Northern Nigeria.
Adansis. Negro tribe on Guinea coast. Sc«
TsHi.
yCoIians. See Hellenes.
Aetas. A Negrito race of the Philippine
Islands, belonging to the Oceanic lamily of
Ethiopic Man. Short of stature, black-skinned,
with woolly hair, they present many points of
resemblance to the Negritoes of Central Africa .
There are many crosses between Aetas and
Malays.
Afars. A nomadic Turki tribe of Persia. See
also Danakii.s.
Afghans. A race of Iranian stock, belonging
to the great Aryan family, who form about half
the population of Afghanistan. They are divided
into various tribes, of which the Duranis are the
dominant one, the Ghilzais the most warlike, and
the Yusufzais the most turbulent. There are also
large tribes known as Pathans, who are of the
same stock as the .\fghans, but are classed
separately. The Afghans are a liandsome and
athletic race, inured to war from their childhood,
lav.-lcss and treacherous, but sober and hardy.
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Throughout the nineteenth century they were a
constant source of trouble to British India, but
a new era seems to have opened under the present
Amir. For non-Afghan inhabitants of Afghanis-
tan, see Hazaras, Kizil-Bashis, and Tajiks.
Afridis. A warlike and turbulent Pathan race,
occupying the neighbourhood of the Khyber
Pass, ami often at war with the English.
Afrikanders. Persons of European descent
born and living in South Africa.
Agaos. An indigenous Hamitic race of
Northern Abyssinia.
Ahoms. Primitive inhabitants of Assam,
belonging to the Indo-Chinese stock of the
Southern IMongolic family.
Ainus. An aberrant famil)' of Caucasic Man
in the Far East. They were probably the
aboriginal inhabitants of Japan, but are now
few in number, and confined to Yezo, the Kurile
Islands, and part of Sakhalin. They have regu-
lar and often handsome features of Caucasic
type, but are of low stature, and characteristically
marked by an abuntlance of coarse, black, wavy
or crisp hair on head, face, and body, whence
they are commonly called the " Hairy Ainus."
Akawais. See Caribs.
Akkas. A pygmy Negrito race of the Welle
district in Central Africa, akin to the Achuas
(q.v.), who are specially interesting because
they are represented on Egyptian monuments of
3400 B.C., with their existing racial characters.
Akkads, or Akkadians. An extinct Meso-
potamian race, founders of the oldest known
civilisation in Babylonia, who belonged to the
Northern Mongolic family, and probably to the
Turki or Finno-Ugrian stock. They invented the
cuneiform alphabet, which was adopted by their
Semitic successors — see Babylonians — and it is
thought that they may have been the ancestors
of the Chinese.
Akpas. See Nigerian Group.
Alani. A warlike nomadic race, probably
belonging to the Turki stock of the Northern
Mongolic family, and allied to the Tartars (q.v.).
In the fifth century they made settlements in
Gaul and Spain, where they were absorbed by
the Vandals and the Visigoths res]:)cctively. The
remnant left in the East of Europe were con-
quered in the thirteenth century by the Golden
Horde, and their name disappeared from history.
Albanians, or Arnauts. The warlike race of
mountaineers who inhabit Albania, on the
western coast of the Balkan Peninsula. They are
semi-civilised, live in a perpetual state of tribal
warfare, and make admirable soldiers, forming
the best part of the Turkish Army. They are
probably the oldest of the Balkan races, and
represent the earliest Aryan immigrants into
Europe [see Illyrians). They arc partly
Christian, partly Mohammedan.
Albigenses. A heretical sect, mostly of
Provcnral descent, who appeared in the South
of France about the eleventh century, and were
rigidly persecuted until they became extinct in
the middle of the thirteenth century.
Alccnanni. An ancient German tribe on Upper
Rhine, of Teutonic stock, from whom the modern
Swatiians and Swiss are in great part descended.
Aleutians. Natives of Aleutian Islands, be-
longmg to Eskimo stock of Northern American
family.
Alfuros. A half-breed race between Malays
and Papuans : in Malaysia, a term given by
312
Malays to their rude non-Mohammedan neigh-
bours.
Algonquian. A group of North American
Indian tribes, formerly inhabiting the Central
and Southern States of America, east of the
Rocky Mountains, and as far south as South
Carolina, now gathered into Indian Reservations.
They include the Algonquin, Blackfoot, Chey-
enne, Cree, Delaware, Fox, Illinois, Massachusett,
Mohican, Ojibway, Sac, Shawnee, and many
smaller tribes.
Alibamus. See Muskhogean.
Ali-Elis. See Turkomans.
Alsatians. Natives of Alsace, of High German
stock, allied to the Swabians (q.v.).
Atnadis. See Welle Group.
Ama. Prefix of many Bantu racial names, as
Ama-Zulu, Ama-Xosa. See Zulu, etc.
American. One of the four main divisions of
the human race, comprising three families,
occupying North, Central, and Southern .\mc'rica
respectively. Typically red-skinned, with lank,
black hair, retreating foreheads, high-bridgetl
noses, antl either long or broatl skulls — dolicho-
ce])halic or brachycephalic.
Americans. The English-speaking white in-
habitants of the United States, mainlj^ of Anglo-
Saxon descent. See also Latin Americans.
Amharas. Natives of Central Abyssinia, of
Hamitic tlcscent.
Amorites. A branch of the ancient Libyan
race, of Semitic origin, inhabiting Canaan before
the arrival of the Israelites from Egypt.
Anatolian Turks. See Turks.
Andamanese. Natives of Andaman Islands,
a race belonging to the Oceanic Negrito family,
possibly representing the primitive type from
which both Negroes and Papuans have sprung.
They exhibit the lowest stage of civilisation.
Andis. See Lesghians.
Angles. A Teutonic race of Low German
stock, who formerly inhabited the country round
Schleswig, in North Germany. In the fifth
century they migrated in large numbers to
Britain, and with the Jutes and Saxons formed
the stock of the Anglo-Saxon or English people. -
Anglo-Saxons. A general name now given to
the English-speaking races of English, Scotch,
and even Irish and Welsh descent, who inhal)it
the British Empire ; in a wider sense, to all people
of British descent.
Annamese. Natives of Annam, or Cochin-
China, belonging to the Indo-Chinese stock of the
Southern Mongolic family ; now under French rule.
Apaches. See Athabascan.
Appalachis. See jMuskhogean.
Arabs. One of the main branches of the
Semitic family, inhabiting the Arabian peninsula.
They are usually divided into two branches, the
Ishmaelites of the north and the Joktanides of
the south. The latter probably represent the
oiliest Arab stock, and may be of African origin.
The primitive Arabs were nomadic horse-breeders
and shepherds, very warlike, and of fine physical
development. Under Islam they reared an endur-
ing religious civilisation, which has had the
greatest infiuence on the world after Christianity.
Arakanese. Natives of Arakan, in Lower
BuriiKi, of Indo-Chinese stock.
Aramaeans. One of the main groups of the
Semitic family, Syro-Chaldeans, who anciently
inhabited Syria, Palestine, and the Euphrates
\'alley. The modern Syrians (q.v.) belong to it.
^
A
BY SIR DAVtD WILKIE, R.A.
/'
/^
A NATIVE OF BRITISH WDIA
313
314
A CIRCASSIAN LADY
A SPANISH CHILD WITH HER NURSE
315
A PERSIAN PRINCE AND HIS NUBIAN SLAVE
316
■ill 1
A DRAGOMAN AT BEYROUT
_J
317
A TRAVELLING TARTAR
318
''^WSTf
fMi'
AN ARAB SHEIK
319
1 .^ j;3S«i:'.
320
AN ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
Araucanians. The chief Indian race of ChiH,
possessing an ancient civiUsation hke those of
Peru and Mexico, though less advanced The
Araucanians are probably' the finest native race
of the New World. They are a fierce and warlike
people, who have always preserved their inde-
pcnilcnce.
Arawaks. A group of South American Indian
tribes in the Guianas, incUuiing Maypuris,
\\'apisianas, Atorais and others.
Arcadians. A race of ancient Greece, inhabit-
ing the central highlands of the Peloponnesus,
whose seclusion from the world caused them to
be idcutiticd with the quality which we still call
Arcatlian simplicity.
Arecunas. See Caribs.
Argentines. White natives of the Argentine
Republic in South America, mainly of Spanish
descent.
Argives. Natives of Argos, the most im-
portant state of Homeric Greece : hence a generic
term for Greeks or Hellenes in the Homeric
Age. Achaeans is another term similarly used.
Armenians. Natives of Armenia, the moun-
tainous country round Mount Ararat, now divided
between Russia, Persia, and Turkey. They
belong to the Iranian stock of the Aryan family,
blended with Semitic blood, and with a still
older unknown but probably non-Aryan element.
They are not warlike, but of quick intelligence
and specially successful in commerce.
Arnauts. See Albanians.
Aryans. The most important family of Cau-
casic Man, to which all the chief civilisations of
modern times belong. A tall, fau-skinned, long-
headed race, whose origin is still doubtful —
though it was probably in Central Asia — and who
spread in prehistoric times over the whole of
Europe and parts of Asia and Africa. Almost all
modern Europeans are of Aryan descent. The
family is also called Indo-European or Indo-
Germanic, but these names are open to objec-
tions from which the term Aryan is free.
Ashantis. See Tshi.
Assamese. Natives of Assam, between India
and Burma, belonging to the Hindu stock of the
Aryan family.
Assinaboins. See Siouan.
Assyrians. One of the main branches of the
Semitic family. The Assyrians founded a great
emjMre in the northern part of Mesopotamia, of
which Nineveh was the capital, and afterwards
concjuered the older Babylonian state (710 b.c.)
and Egypt (671 B.C.), thus forming the first
world-empire known to history. Within a century
.Assyria had become a Median province, and its
people ceased to have an independent existence.
Athabascan or Tinncy. A group of North
American Indian tribes, formerly inhabiting
Alaska and the greatest part of Canada. It in-
cludes the Apaches, Chippewayans, Hupas,
Kutchins, Navajos, Tacullis, and tlmbquas.
Athenians. The most important race of
ancient Greece, whose city of Athens was the
earliest centre of civilisation in the historical
age of Europe.
Australians. The aborigines of Australia, a
branch of the Oceanic Negro family. Their
numerous tribes present a general uniformity of
physical and mental development, under which
two main types may be recognised. The earlier
of these is probably that shown by the extinct
Tasmanians (q.v.), one of the lowest races in
point of culture yet discovered, who were
probably still in the earliest stage of the Stone
Age. The other type was perhaps akin to the
Dravidians of India, or to a very low Caucasic
race. The Australians are among the lowest
of savage races, and present many features which
have thrown light on the manners, customs and
beliefs of primitive man.
Australians. White inhabitants of Australia,
mostly of Anglo-Saxon descent.
Austrians. Inhabitants of the Austrian em-
pire, including a great diversity of races. The
name is properly applied only to the German-
speaking people, of High-German Teutonic
stock, who predominate in Austria proper.
Auvergnats. Natives of Auvergne, in Central
France. A short, sturdy, dark, round-skulled
race, formerly regarded as typical Aryan Celts,
but possibly descended from an older non-Aryan
people. Much employed in Paris as porters.
Avars. See Lesghians.
Avars. A Tartar tribe, belonging to the Turki
stock of the Northern Mongolic family, who
appeared in the district round the Caspian Sea
about the fourth century, and later made
predatory raids over a large part of Eastern
Europe. They were subdued by Charlemagne,
and disappeared from history in the ninth cen-
tury. They seem to have been closely allied to
the Huns, whom they resembled in physical
characteristics and warlike qualities.
Awawandias. Bantu Negroes of the Nyassa
plateau in British Central Africa.
Aymaras. A race of South American Indians
in Bolivia, probably related to the Incas (q.v.)
and perhaps their ancestors.
Azandeh, or Niam-Niam. Sudanese Negroes
of the Welle group. Notorious cannibals.
Aztecs. The dominant Indian race in Mexico
at the arrival of the Spanish invaders. They en-
tered the country about the end of the thirteenth
century, and founded the city of Mexico in 1325.
Around it they reared a remarkable civilisation
and a sanguinary religion. They were warlike,
ferocious and cruel, but had a considerable
aptitude for the arts of peace. Their empire was
destroyed by Cortes in 1521, and annexed to
Spain. Every trace of Aztec nationality was
suppressed, but their name still lingers among
the Nahuan Indians, and their blood is mixed
with that of the conquerors. Many attempts
have been made to find an Old World origin for
Mexican culture, but they are not convincing.
Babylonians. The Semitic race which founded
one of the greatest of ancient civilisations
in the rich alluvial plains of Chalda-a and on
the arid plateau of Mesopotamia. Their history
is too long to summarise here, but it may be
stated that the Semitic peoples, variously known
as Babylonians, Chalda^ans, Elamites, Kledians,
and Assyrians, invaded and dispossessed at
different times the primitive Mongolic race of
Akkads (q.v.). Their earliest settlement seems to
have been at Ur of the Chaldees, on the right
bank of the Euphrates. Babylon and Nineveh
were afterwards the seats of the Babylonian and
Assyrian powers, whilst Elamite and Median
conquerors intervened at various times. These
powerful Semitic races made great advances in
art, science, literature, religion, and social policy.
Their first incursion, probably from Arabia,
into the Euphrates Valley dates back to about
3800 B.C.
321
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Baggaras. A fierce and warlike race settled
in the Aiiglo-Egj'ptian Sudan, and formerly
dominant under the Mahdi.
Baghirmis. See Lake Chad Group.
Bakairi. See Caries.
Bakatla, Bakwena. Bantu Negroes of
Bechuana stock.
Bakwiri. Bantu Negroes settled in the Came-
roon,s.
Balinese. A Malayan race of the East Indian
Archipelago.
Balolo. Bantu Negroes of the Middle Congo ;
one of the finest negro races.
Balong. Bantu Negroes of West Africa.
Baltis. A hardy Tibetan race, inhabiting
the Alpine valley of the Upper Indus.
Baluba, or Basonge. A dominant Bantu Negro
race of the Kassai basin in Equatorial Africa.
Baluchis, or Beluchis. Natives of Baluchistan,
south of Afghanistan, of Iranian (.\ryan) descent,
with a mingling of Tartar (Mongolic) blood.
The dominant race of the country is the Brahui,
aboriginals who are probably of Mongolic descent,
allied to the Dra vidians (q.v.) of India. The
lirahui arc of Mongolic type, short, with round
flat faces, hospitable and generous. They are
the more settled portion of the inhabitants.
The Baluchis are chiefly nomads, taller, with
more Aryan features, a warlike and predatory
people.
Balunda. Bantu Negroes of South Central
Africa, occupying the Congo-Zambesi divide.
Bamangwato. Bantu Negroes of north Be-
chuanaland ; Khama's semi-civilised people.
Bambaras. See Mandingan.
Banandi. Bantu Negroes of apish type, in
the Seniliki forests.
Bangalas. Bantu Negroes of Middle Congo,
on the I'bangi river.
Bantus. One of the two subdivisions of the
African Negro family of Ethiopic Man, occupy-
ing the southern half of the African continent,
south of the Cameroons and Albert Nyanza.
.\ Negro race modified from the Sudanese type
by Hamite influences.
Banyai. Bantu Negroes, south of the Middle
Zambesi.
Banyoro. See Wanvoro.
Bapedi. Bantu Negroes of Bechuana stock.
Bareas. Smlanese Negroes inhabiting the
Abyssinian slopes.
Barguzins. See Buriats.
Baris. See Nilitic Group.
Barolongs. Bantu Negroes of Bechuana stock,
between Wyburg and Molopo river. Mafeking is
their capital.
Barotse. Bantu Negroes of Bechuana stock,
about headwaters of Molopo river.
Barres. South .\mcrican Indians in Venezuela
and Guiana.
kBases. Sudanese Negroes of Abyssinian slopes,
a very low negroid type.
Bashkirs. \ branch of the Turki stock of the
NortiiiTu Mongolic family. They are first men-
tioned in the tenth century as a warlike and
idolatrous race, noted for their large, round,
short heads, from which their name is derived.
They now inhabit the Orenberg and Perm
districts of Russia, on the western slopes of the
l^ral. Some are settled agriculturists, others
pastf)ral nomads.
Bashukulumbwe. Bantu Negroes of Kafue
basin in Zambesia.
322
Basimba or Cimbebas. Aboriginal Negroes of
South Angola ; a low Bantu type, or possibly
Negrito, allied to Bushmen.
Basonge. See Baluba.
Basques. One of the few non-Aryan races still
existing in Europe, where they inhabit the dis-
tricts on the French and Spanish sides of the
Western Pyrenees. They originally occupied
a much wider area in this neighbourhood, and
preserve their ancient costume and language.
Their ethnological affinities are still in dispute,
but the best opinion is that they represent the
ancient Iberians (q.v.), a Western Hamitic race,
related to the Berbers of North .\frica on the one
hand and to the Picts of Scotland and the ancient
Irish on the other. Probably they have occupied
their present home since Neolithic times. They
are mainly agriculturists, with all the rustic vir-
tues, and make excellent sokliers and servants.
Bassas. See Liberian Group.
Bastaards. S?e Griquas.
Bastarnae. See Goths.
Basutos. The most civilised race of Bantu
Negroes, of the Bechuana stock, who inhabit
the rugged uplands of Basutoland, a British
Crown Colony. They have long been subjected
to European and Christian influence, under
which they have presented the sole instance
of a pure negro community, which has made
itself self-supporting and approximately civilised.
They have succeeded in assimilating Western
culture, and their little State — which always pre-
served its independence against other natives and
Boers — is a very flourishing example of what
the negro can do under favourable auspices.
Batanga. Bantu Negroes of the Cameroons.
Batavi. An ancient German race inhabiting
the island formed by the Meuse and an arm of
the Rhine. Ancestors of the modern Dutch.
Bateke. Bantu Negroes of Congo, above
Stanley Pool.
Batjans. See Indonesian.
Batlapi. Bantu Negroes of Bechuana stock,
near \'ryburg.
Batonga or Batoka. Bantu Negroes of
Zambesia, Manicaland and Tongaland.
Battaks. A pre-Malay race of North Sumatra,
probably allietl to the Polynesians {q.v.).
Batwas. .\ pygmy (q.v.) Negrito race south
of Congo, allied to Bushmen.
Batwanas. Bantu Negroes of North Bcchuana-
lan.l.
Bavarians. A branch of the High German
st(jck o{ the Teutonic family, in Bavaiia.
Bayansis. Bantu Negroes of MidiUe Congo,
on Kwa KiviT. Strong negro element.
Bechuanas. A main stock of Bantu Negroes,
occupying what is known as British Bechuana-
land. The name is of European origin, and has
no native significance as applied to the race,
but is a convenient general term.
Bedawi or Bedouins. Nomadic Arabs (q.v.)
who inhabit the deserts of Arabia and the
neighbouring countries, and live by stock-
breeding and robbery. Their breed of horses is
world-famous. They are independent, chivalrous
and hospitable. They correspond to the Biblical
Ishmaelites, whose race and customs they pre-
serve practically unchanged.
Bejas. A race of Eastern Hamitcs, of splendid
jihysiiiue, occupying the eastern seaboard of
Africa north of Massowah, including Bisharis,
Hadendowas, and other tribes,
AN ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
Belgae. The northernmost of the three races
occupyin-j Gaul in Ca'sar's time, probably of Low
German stock, with perhaps a Celtic element.
Belgians. The inhabitants of Belgium,
formerly the Spanish or Austrian Netherlands,
of very mixed origin. The natives are either
Flemings of Teutonic stock, or Celtic Walloons
iq.v.). Mingled with these arc large numbers of
German, French and Dutch immigrants ; and
constant crossing of blood has tended to produce
a truly Belgian type out of all these fluctuating
elements. They are among the most patient
and productive of agriculturists, mostly small
proprietors ; and they possess flourishing
manufactures and a rich commerce through the
great port of Antwerp
Beluchis. See Baluchis.
Bengalis. The majority of the natives of
Bengal belong to the Hindu stock of the Aryan
family, which was probably the first to develop
a true civilisation and a great literature (in the
ancient Sanscrit tongue). The typical Bengali
is quick-witted, versatile, and successful in the
arts of peace, but not warlike — though the native
army of the old East Indian Company was
largely recruited from Bengal. The Bengali
Babu, of the professional or lower official class,
is well known.
Beluchis. See Baluchis.
Benin. See Nigerian Group.
Berbers. A Western Hamitic race occupy-
ing the Atlas Mountains and the Northern
Sahara, of predatory and warlike habits. They
arc known in Algeria as Kabylcs, and in Sahara
as Tuaregs. Largely dark-haired and swarthy,
with prominent ■ noses, they belong to the
Melanochroid branch of Caucasic Man. They
correspond to the ancient Numidians.
Betsimisarakas. One of the three main
divisions of the Malagasy, or Malayo-African
race which inhabits Madagascar. They occupy
the east coast.
Bhils. Primitive and still wild non-Arvan
inhabitants of Central India, of Kolarian
family [q-v.).
Bisharis. See Bejas.
Blackfoot Indians. See Algoxouian.
Bceotians. A branch of the ^olian race in
ancient (ireece. The Boeotians were supposed to
be peculiarly dull, and were the typical rustic
clowns of Greek literature.
Boers. White inhabitants of Cape Colony,
the Tiansvaal, and the Orange River Colony,
mainly of Dutch descent, with a French Hugue-
not clement and a sprinkling of Negro blood.
They were the original colonists of South Africa,
which they entered in 1652 A race of farmers
(Boer is derived from the Dutch boor, peasant),
they also proved themselves to be hardy pioneers
and admirable, though not at all romantic,
fighters, learning in long native wars the arts of
strategy, which they exercised so well against
the English in the South .\frican War of 1899-
1902. They have now accepted the Enghsh
rule, and promise to be among our most flourish-
ing African subjects.
Bohemians. See Czech.
Bolivians. White natives of Bolivia in South
America, of Spanish descent, with a considerable
admixture of Indian blood.
Bongos. See Nii.itic Group.
Botocudos. South American Indians on
eastern seaboard of Brazil.
Brahui. See Baluchis.
Brazilians. White natives of Brazil, mainly of
Portugutse descent, but with a considerable
admixture, in many districts, of Indian and
negro blood.
Bretons. Natives of Brittany, descended from
a short, round-headed, dark race, generally
called Celtic, l)ut perhaps pre-Aryan.
Bribris. South American Indians of Costa
Rica.
Britons, (i) The ancient Britons were a
Celtic race, whose remnants are still to be found
in the Welsh (q.v.). They attained a consider-
able degree of civilisation under the Roman con-
querors, and adopted Christianity The Anglo-
Saxon conquest of Britain drove most of them
back into Wales, Cornwall, and other outlying
portions of the island, whilst the remainder
were either destroyed or assimilatctl. (2) In
the wide modern sense, Britons are the white
citizens of the British Empire.
Bugis or Buginese. Natives of Boni in
Celebes ; a primitive Malay race.
Bulalas. See Lake Chad Group.
Bulgars. A branch of the Finns {q.v.), who
were originallv settled on the banks of the Volga.
In the sixth century they crossed the Danube
and conquered the modern Bulgaria, then
occupied by the Slavonic Slovenians (q.v.).
A speedy fusion took place between the Slove-
nians and the Bulgars, who adopted the language
and customs of the former, and rose to greatness
as a Slav power. In the ninth and tenth centuries
they ruled the greater part of the Balkan
Peninsula, and warred successfully with the
Byzantine Empire, which, however, subjected
them in 1019 under Basil II., " the slayer of the
Bulgarians." Later they passed imder the
Turkish rule, and ceased to have an independent
national existence down to the nineteenth
century.
Bulgarians. Inhabitants of the modern
Balkan state of Bulgaria, descended from the
Bulgars (q.v.) with considerable admixtures of
Greek and Turkish blood.
Bulloms. See Temne Group.
Burgundians. An ancient people of Teutonic
race (High German), who were originally settled
between the Oder and Vistula. In the fifth
century they invaded Gaul, where they formed
the first kingdom of Burgundy, between the
Aar and the Rhone. There were many later
Burgundian kingdoms and duchies, of which the
last and most famous was that of Charles the
Bold, annexed to France in 1477- The Burgun-
dians are now French subjects, but still show
traces of their Teutonic origin.
Buriats. The Western or Siberian branch of
the Mongol stock of the Northern Mongolic
family. They occupy the vicinity of Lake
Baikal. The majority are nomad pastors, but
some have taken to agriculture. A peace-loving,
but lazy and drunken people ; they include
various tribes, such as the Barguzins, Selengese,
Idinese, Kudaras and Olkhonese.
Burmese, or Burmans. A short-statured,
thick-set and flat-featured people, approaching
the Chinese type, the principal race of the Indo-
Chinese stock of the Southern Mongolic family.
They inhabit Burma — now a British possession —
and are excitable, turbulent, and given to
dacoity, or highway robbery. They make good
323
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
farmers and shopkeepers, but are not warlike
or methodical.
Burus. See Indonesians.
Bushmen. A nomadic Negro race of South
Africa, who stand at the lowest stage of human
culture. They are probably the aborigines of
South Africa, where they have been dispossessed
by Hottentots and Bantus from the north.
They cire thin and wiry, of small stature, not
unlike the Hottentots in colour and features.
They live by hunting, and possess a curious
mythology. Their artistic powers, comparable
to those of Palaeolithic Man, are shown in the
remarkable rock-drawings on the walls of their
caves.
Calchaquis. South American Indians, in
Plate River district.
C&mboj&ns. Natives of Cambodia, Mongoloid
approaching Caucasic type
C&naanites. One of the main blanches of the
great Semitic family, inhabiting Palestine and
the Mauritanian sea-coast in ancient times,
including Jews, Phoenicians, Carthaginians,
Moabites, Amorites, Idumaeans and Philistines
iq.v.). A fierce and warlike people, with a
remarkable genius for religion, which has greatly
influenced the modern world.
Canadians. White natives of Canada, of
mixed French and Anglo-Saxon descent.
Caribs. South American Indians, formerly
occupying the West Indian Islands, and now the
shores of the Caribbean Sea, including Macusi,
Bakairi, Akawai, Arecuna, and Rucuyenne
tribes. They are strongly built, warlike and
fierce, but honourable. The term cannibal is
supposed to be a corruption of their name
based on their habits.
Carthaginians. Natives of one of the great
empires of the ancient world, which was founded
at Carthage, near the modern Bizerta, by
Phoenician colonists in the ninth century B.C.,
and was destroyed by Rome in 146 b.c. Carthage
was the great rival of Rome as a Mediterranean
power. Its inhabitants belonged to the Canaanite
stock of the Semitic family, and were a nation
of traders, cruel and gloomy in temperament,
worshippers of Moloch with human .sacrifices.
Though in Hannibal they produced one of the
greatest of generals, they were not warlike, and
trusted chiefly to mercenaries, wherefore they fell.
Catalans. Natives of North-east Spain, mo.stly
of Gothic descent, and still distinct from other
Spaniards in language and costume. Honest and
enterprising, turbulent, and intensely devoted to
liberty.
Caucasians. One of the families of Caucasic
Man, inhabiting the mountainous region of the
Caucasus, and divided into southern, western, and
eastern branches [see Georgians, Circassians,
Chechenzes, Lesghians]. They include a great
number of different tribes, who seem to have
settled there from the earliest historical times.
Some of these, the Melanochroid highlanders,
like the Georgians, Circassians, and Lesghians,
E resent an almost ideal standard of physical
eauty, whilst others are squat and ungainly.
Some ethnologists see in the Caucasus the
primitive home of the Aryan family, from whom
the Caucasians would, on this view, be an off-
shoot. The Ossets (q.v.) are certainly Aryan.
The Caucasians are very warlike, and struggled
till quite recently with success against the
Russian domination.
324
Caucasic. One of the four great divisions of
the human race. Type, white-skinned, square-
jawed (orthognathous), skull between broad and
long (mesocephalic), hair soft, straight, or wavy ;
in intelligence, enterprise, and civilisation, much
superior to other divisions.
Cayugas. See Iroquoian.
Celts. See Kelts.
Chakhars. A branch of Eastern Mongols,
settled on the south-east boundary of the Desert
of Gobi.
Chaldseans. See Babylonians.
Chamorros. Aborigines of the Ladrone
Islands, so named from their thievish propensi-
ties. A branch of the Oceanic Mongolic family,
probably allied to the Formosans {q.v.).
Chancas. See Incas.
Chaudors. A nomad tribe inhabiting the
steppes east of the Caspian and south of the
Oxus. See Turkomans.
Chapogirs. See Tunguses.
Charruas. An extinct race of South American
Indians in South Brazil, peculiar for their
extremely black colour with lank hair.
Chechenzes. A branch of the Eastern stock
of the Caucasian family, inhabiting the northern
slopes of the Eastern Caucasus. Their chief
tribes are Ingushis, Kishis, and Tushis.
Cheremisses. See Finns.
Cherokees. A brave and warlike tribe of
North American Indians. See Iroquoian.
Cheyennes. See Algonquian.
Chibchas. South American Indians of Bogota.
Chichimecs. See Nahuans.
Chickasaws. See Muskhogeans.
Chilians. White natives of Chili, of Spanish
descent, with a mixture of Araucanian Indian
blood.
Chinese. One of the most numerous races of
the world, inhabiting the Chinese Empire. They
are a stock of the Southern Mongolic family, and
it is thought by some ethnologists that they are
descended from the Mongolic Akkads {q.v.) of
Mesopotamia. There is a remarkable uniformity
in the physical type presented by the Chinese in
all climates and environments ; they are the
most homogeneous of great peoples. They are
yellow-skinned, short in stature, with obliquely
set eyes, high cheek-bones, long skulls, and broad
faces, with slight prognathism. They possess
an ancient and highly organised civilisation,
which is characterised by its conservatism and
slowness to accept new ideas — so different in this
from the Japanese. The Chinese are naturally
frugal, industrious, and patient ; they are
excellent agriculturists, and very gregarious ;
they despise war, Ijut make excellent soldiers
when drilled by Europeans or Japanese. They
are eminently literary, and have a high system
of morality. There are many local varieties,
such as the Puntis of the Canton districts, the
Hakkas of Swatow, the Hoklas of Fohkien, the
Dungans {q.v.). which need not be farther
particularised.
Chinooks. A nearly extinct tribe of North
American Indians on the Columbia River, on
whose language is based the Chinook jargon, or
traders' Lingua Franca of British Columbia.
Chins. See Singphos.
Chippewayans. See Athabascan.
Chiquitos. South American Indians of Upper
Paraguay basin.
AN ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
Chiriguanos. South American Indians of
Bolivia.
Chitr&lis. Natives of Chitral, in the Hindu
Khush, rough, hardy hillmen, closely allied to
the Kafirs (q.v.) of Kafiristan.
Chocos. A tribe of South American Indians
of Matto Grosso.
CKoktaws. See Muskhogean.
Chont&ls. Central American Indians of
Nicaragua. ,
Chols. See Maya-Quiche.
Chorasses. See Kalmuks.
Chorotegans. Central American Indians of
Nicaragua.
Chukchis. A Northern Mongohc race of
North-east Siberia, closely akin to the American
Eskimo in features and customs. They are of
high character and very independent, but at a
low stage of civilisation, and live by reindeer-
breeding and hunting. A branch of the Chuk-
chis, differing mainly in language, is known as
the Koryaks.
Chunchos. South American Indians on tribu-
taries of Beni River in Peru.
Cimbebas. See Basimba.
Circassians, or Tchcrkesses. A race of Cau-
casian mountaineers, formerly inhabiting the
Black Sea coast between Ana'pa and Pitzunta,
of high physical type, who maintained an
unavailing struggle against Rus.sia till 1864,
when their subjugation was followed by a whole-
sale emigration of the Circassian tribes to the
Turkish Empire. Allied to them are the
Abkhasians and Kabards (q.v.).
Colombians. White natives of Colombia, in
Central America, mostly of Spanish descent,
with an admixture of Indian and negro blood.
Comanches. See Shoshonean.
Conibos. South American Indians of Peru.
Copts. Christian descendants of the ancient
Egyptians {q.v.), of middle stature, slender limbs,
and pale complexion, who inhabit Egypt, and
preserve the language and customs of the last
period of ancient Egyptian civilisation. They
are essentially townsmen, clerks, or artisans.
Coras. See Opata-Pima.
Cornish. A race of Brythonic or P Celts,
akin to Welsh and Bretons, inhabiting Cornwall
in earlier times ; now absorbed in English stock.
Their language became extinct in seventeenth
or eighteenth century. The crossing of the
Cornish Celts with Anglo-Saxons has given birth
to a singularly fine race of hardy fishermen and
miners.
Corsicans. The aborigines of Corsica were
probably a Western Hamitic race, allied to the
Ligurians (q.v.). They were followed by Ionian
invaders, and in turn by Carthaginian. Roman,
Vandal, Hun, Gothic, Saracenic, and Italian
conquerors, each of whom has added something
to the mixture of blood in the modern Corsicans,
a turbulent, lawless, and warlike race (now
belonging to France), whose greatest son was
Napoleon.
Costa Ricans. White natives of Costa Rica,
in Central America, mostly of pure Spanish
descent.
Crees. See Algonquian.
Creek Indians. See Muskhogean.
Creoles. Persons born in past or present
French, Spanish, or Portuguese colonies, of pure
European descent.
Cretans. An ancient race of prehistoric
culture [see Mvcen^^ans] ; in modern times
chiefly Greek, mixed with Turk.
Croats. Inhabitants of Croatia, now mainly of
Slavonic race, mingled with an earlier short,
dark race of non-Aryan descent. One of the
motley races of the Austrian Empire. They are
warlike, turbulent, and eager for independence.
Cro-Magnon. A prehistoric race settled in
the Vezere district of France, which may be
taken as the primitive type of Caucasic Man. It
is only known by a few skulls and other relics,
and probably dates back to the Glacial Period, c
Crow Indians. See Siouan.
Cymry. See Welsh.
Czechs, or Bohemians. The most westerly
branch of the Slavonic stock of the Aryan
family, now occupying Bohemia, Moravia, and
other parts of Austria. They are closely allied
to the Slovaks of Hungary. They migrated from
the Upper Vistula district to the modern Bohemia
in the fifth century. Long an independent
kingdom, and a bulwark of Christendom against
the Turks, Bohemia passed to Austria in 1526.
During the last century there has been a great
recrudescence of the Czech nationality and
language. The Czechs as a race are very musical
and artistic.
Daflas. A Tibetan race inhabiting the
northern border of Assam.
Dahomans. See Ewe.
Dakotas. See Siouan.
Dalmatians. A Southern Slavonic race, crossed
with Gothic blood. A fine race of hardy seamen,
they manned the Venetian fleets, but now belong
to Austria.
Damaras, or Hau-Khoin. See Hereros.
Danakils, or Afars. An Eastern Hamitic
race settled in the vicinity of Obock, between
Abyssinia and the Red Sea. They are nomad
pastors and fishermen, well-built, and slender.
Danes. Natives of Denmark, belonging to
the Scandinavian stock of the Aryan family.
Denmark was originally inhabited by the Angles,
Saxons, and Jutes, who colonised England. On
their departure, the Danes from Zealand settled
on the deserted lands, and there reared the
kingdom which still exists. The early Danes
were brave warriors and skilled seamen, who for
a time ruled Saxon England under Canute.
Their descendants, of comparatively pure blood,
preserve these characteristics, and are also
industrious agriculturists.
Dards. A warlike and hardy race of Aryan
descent, inhabiting the mountainous country
around Gilgit, in North-west India, of whom
the Hunzas and Nagars are the chief tribes.
Dargos. See Lesghians.
Delawares. A North American Indian race
with whom William Penn dealt in the 17th
century: now fairly civilised. See Algonquian.
Didos. See Lesghians.
Dinkas. See Nilitic Group.
Dogras. An Aryan race in the Punjab,
between the Chinab and the Ravi, who contribute
excellent soldiers to the British Native Army.
Dorians. See Hellenes.
Dravidas, or Dravidians. Indigenous non-
Aryan inhabitants of South India, including
the Telingas or Telugu of the Nizam's Dominions,
the Tamils of Karnatic and Ceylon, the Kanarese
of Mysore, the Malayalim of Malabar Coast,
those wild hunters the Gonds of Vindhya Hills,
the Sinhalese of Ceylon, and perhaps the Veddahs,
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
iq.v.). A Mongoloid race originally, which has
been assimilated to the Caucasic type by long
intermixture of blood.
Druses. A brave, handsome and industrious
white race, who have been settled in the Lebanon
district of Syria for at least 800 years, and
owe their unity to the possession of a special
religion. Their origin is uncertain, but they
are probably of a mixed stock, to which Arabs,
Kurds, and Persians have all contributed.
They are fair-haired and of light complexion.
They are very warlike, have always preserved
their independence against the Turks, and are
the inveterate enemies of the Maronites (q.v.).
Dungans. Southern Mongolic inhabitants of
Zungaria, between Tian-Shan and Altai. Allied
to Chinese {q.v.).
Durbats. See Kalmuks.
Duranis. See Afghans.
Dyaks. The aborigines of Borneo, probably
akin to the Malays (q.v.), whom they resemble
physically, though of greater average stature.
They are active and warlike, and formerly in-
dulged in the practice of head-hunting, now
dying out. The Sea-Dyaks were bold and
inveterate pirates. They possess a consider-
able degree of indigenous civilisation, and their
moral character is very fine.
Easter Islandsrs. (i) See Polynesians.
(2) Easter Island once possessed an older
race of inhabitants, now extinct, who have left
very remarkable traces in the shape of numerous
colossal statues, thin-lipped and disdainful,
standing on platforms of Cyclopean masonry,
as well as many stone houses with thick walls,
painted on the inside. Nothing farther is known
of their race or history.
Ecuadorians. White natives of Ecuador, in
South America, of S])anish descent ; noted for
their laziness and political instability.
Edomites. See Idum^ans.
Egbas. See Yorub.-^s.
Egyptians, (i) The ancient inhabitants of
Egypt — known to them as Khcm, the Biblical
Mizraim — who reared one of the oldest and most
important civilised states of the ancient world.
The aborigines of Egypt were apparently a
Palaeolithic branch of Ethiopic Man, allied to the
modern Bushmen. They were dispossessed and
practically exterminated, probably about 7000
B.C., by a slender, fair-skinned race of European
type, belonging to the Hamitic family, and
resembling the modern Berbers {q.v.) in many
respects. These were probably the same as the
ancient Libyans {q.v.). Later this race was
modified by the introduction of a Semitic element,
partly from Syria, partly from the Phoenician
conquerors who founded dynastic rule in Egypt
under Menes, between 5cx)o and 4cx)o b.c.
Their later history is WTitten on their imperish-
able monuments, and need not be summarised
here. In later times the Egyptian racial type
was modified by Greek and Roman influence.
The ancient Egyptians were highly skilled in
agriculture and engineering, warlike but not
aggressive, and with a highly developed literature
and religion. (2) The modern Egyptians are
partly descended from the ancient ligyptians,
whose racial type as represented on the monu-
ments is still to be found in purity, mingled with
Bedouin Arabs, Turks, Syrians, and other
races. See Copts and Fellahin.
English. Natives of England ; used in a
326
wider sense as equivalent to citizens of the
British Empire [see Britons, Anglo-Saxons].
The English people are a Low German branch
of the Teutonic stock of the Aryan family, with
a faint Celtic element derived from the primi-
tive Britons, a strong Scandinavian element
especially in the north-east), derived from the
invading Danes and Norsemen in the ninth
to eleventh centuries, and a considerable Norman
element — Norse modified by French cidture.
The typical Englishman is white-skinned and
' fair-haired, belonging to the Xanthochroi, but
there are many deviations due to modifying
influences. The race is eminently warlike and
aggressive, and makes the most successful
colonisers known to the world.
Eric Indians. See Iroquoian.
Erse. See Irish.
Eshi-Kongo. A semi-civilised race of Bantu
Negroes, belonging to the ancient Kongo Empire,
now Portuguese West Africa.
Eskimos, or Innuits. An Arctic aboriginal
race, now inhabiting Greenland and the northern
coasts of the American continent. They are
nomadic, live by hunting and fishing, and are
inured to extremes of cold. They are very
broad-headed, fat, and of short stature, with
fiat (juasi-Mongolic features. They seem to
occupy a place midway between the North
American Indian and the Mongolic type, and
there is some reason to suppose that they
represent a prehistoric Mongoloid incursion from
Northern Asia, or perhaps from Indo-Malaysia.
Esthonians. A branch of Baltic Finns {q.v.)
settled in Esthonia, and possessing an ancient
ballad literature and mythology.
Ethiopians. An ancient Berber tribe, settled
in Egypt at least 5,000 years ago, now represented
by the fair Berbers of Rlauritania. Homer called
them " blameless," because he knew so little
about them. See Nubians.
Ethiopic. One of the four great divisions of
the human race, occupying Africa, Australia,
and many islands of the Eastern Ocean. Its
members are typically black-skinned and woolly
haired, with projecting jaws and broad skulls.
Etruscans. An ancient Italian people, in-
habiting Etruria in North Italy in pre-Roman
times. They probably consisted of an aboriginal
Pclasgian (g.v.) race, modified by a dominant
race of invaders, who may have been of Mongolic
type, or perhaps akin to the Hittitcs {q.v.).
The Etruscans may be classed as Hamitic.
They had a distinctive civilisation, and made
great progress in art, of which many monuments
remain. The Etruscan confederation, of which
W'ii was the chief city, long warred with the
rising power of Rome, under whose dominion it
fell in the fourth century B.C. Families of un-
doubted Etruscan descent are still found in
North Italy.
Europeans. Natives of Europe, mainly Aryan.
Ewe. A group of Sudanese Negro tril)es -of
Guinea Coast. The best known are the Daho-
mans, or natives of the ancient kingdom of
Dahomey, on the Slave Coast. Of small stature,
but robust and warlike, they are noted for their
great human sacrifices and their employment of
female warriors or " Amazons." Now under
French rule. The Togos are also an Ewe tribe.
Fans. A race of powerful and aggressive
warriors, who intruded into Gaboon -Ogoway
district about the middle of the nineteenth
327
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
century ; possibly related to Azandeh or Fulahs
iqv.). jCannibals, but otherwise of higher
intellect and morality than the average Negro,
from whom they differ in physical type.
F&ntis. See Tshi.
Fellahin. The labouring peasantry of modem
Egypt, intlustrious but not waiiike, descendants
of ancient Egyptians, with a mixture of Syrian
and Arab blood.
Felup. A group of Sudanese Negro tribes on
Casamanza and Cacheo estuaries.
Fertits. See Nilitic Group.
Fijians. Natives of Fiji, belonging to the
Melanesian stock of the Oceanic Negro family.
Formerly ferocious cannibals, they are now
civilised.
Filipinos. See Philippines.
Fingus, or Ama-Fingu. Bantu Negroes of
the Kafir division in South-east Africa, regarded
by Zulus and Ama-Xosa as an inferior race.
Finno-Ugrian. A stock of the Northern
Mongolic family, including (i) Ugrian or Siberian
Finns, of which the chief races are Soyots,
Ostyaks, Samoyedes, Voguls, Permian Finns,
Siryanians, and Magyars {q.v.) ; (2) European
Finns, divided into : (a) Volga Finns, (b) Baltic
Finns.
Finns. The Finns proper are the inhabitants
of Finland, between Russia and Norway. They
are a Northern Mongolic race, of Finno-Ugrian
stock, who are supposed to have originated
beside the head waters of the Yenisei River.
They entered Finland about the end of the
seventh century and established themselves
there, being afterwards annexed, first by Sweden
and then by Russia. They are a strong, hardy
race, who make excellent seamen, with round
faces, fair hair and blue eyes. They are honest,
highly moral and religious, and possess a re-
markable ballad and folk-tale literature, of
which the Kalevala is the chief example. The
Baltic Finns of allied race include Esthonians,
Karelians, Lapps, Livonians and Tavastians
iq.v.). The Volga Finns are another branch of
the same people, whose chief tribe was the
ancient Bulgars {q.v.). The Mordvins and Chere-
misses, still settled on the banks of the Volga in
small communities, belong to the same race.
Flathead or Salish Indians. \ mixed race
of North American Indians, in British Columbia
and Montana.
Flemings, or Flemish. The inhabitants of
Flanders, now divided between Belgium and
Holland, descended from Belgic tribes settled
there in Caesar's time. They are a Low German
branch of the Teutonic stock. They are an
industrious and honest, though phlegmatic,
people, who played a great part in mediaeval
commerce.
Formosans. Natives of Formosa, of mixed
Malayan and Negrito descent. They were
divided into three classes by the Chinese in-
vaders : the Pepohwan, civilised agriculturists,
under Chinese rule ; Sekhwan, settled tribes
who acknowledged Chinese rule ; and Chinhwan,
the wild savage tribes of the mountains, who
waged unceasing war against the invaders.
The island has now passed under Japanese
dominion. The Formosans in general approxi-
mate to the Malay type, but are more sturdily
built.
Fox Indians. See Algonquian.
Franks. A confederation of Germanic tribes,
32«
dwelling on the Middle and Lower Rhine in the
third century. They belonged to the High
German branch of the Teutonic stock. In the
third and fourth centuries they began to invade
Gaul, where they established a Frankish kingdom
under Clovis (48 1-5 1 1 ), who adopted Christianity.
This later developed into the modern State of
France. The Franks were a brave and stalwart
race of warriors, with blue eyes and long flowing
hair, well-built and large-limbed. They were a
nation of democratic fighting men, who practised
agriculture in the intervals of war.
French. The inhabitants of modern France,
a race of mixed origin. Among their ancestors
are the Celtic Gauls, the Teutonic Belgae and
Franks, the Hamitic Iberians, the Romans,
and the Scandinavian Normans (q.v.). They
are probably the quickest-witted and most in-
telligent race of modern Europe. Extremely
warlike and aggressive in earlier days, they are
now displaying greater devotion to the arts of
peace, especially agriculture. Paris has long
been the chief centre of ideas in Europe.
Frisians. A Teutonic race of Low German
stock, living between Scheldt and Weser in
Roman times, now belonging to the Nether-
lands.
Fuegians. Natives of Tierra del Fuego in
South America, savages of a very low physical
and mental type.
Fulahs. A warlike and predatory race of
Saharan Hamites, formerly occupying small
communities throughout the West and Central
Sudan, who over-ran the native Hausa States
about 1 800- 1 8 10, and founded the empire of
Sokoto.
Furs. See Nuba Group.
Ga. A Sudanese Negro group in Guinea,
including Accras and Krobos.
Gaels. See Highlanders.
Gaikas and Galekas. See Xosas.
Galchas. Highlanders of Hindu Kush and
Turkistan, of Iranian descent.
Gallegos. Natives of Galicia, in Spain, of
Gothic descent.
Gallas. A branch of Eastern Hamites,
occupying Gallaland, south of Abyssinia. The
finest people in all Africa, strongly built, of a
light chocolate colour. They are distinguished
for their energy and honesty. They are divided
into numerous tribes, and are inveterate foes of
the Somalis.
Gallinas. Sudanese Negroes of Sierra Leone.
Garamantes. An ancient Hamitic race in-
habiting the neighbourhood of Tripoli in Roman
times.
Garhwalis. Tibetan natives of Garhwal, on
the border of Tibet.
Gascons. Natives of Gascony, of Basque
descent, modified by Frank and French blood.
They are notorious for their lively imagination
and boasting " Gasconades."
Gauchos. A mixed race of Spanish and
Indian descent, admirable horsemen, who are
the chief herdsmen of Uruguay and the Argentine
He])iil)lic. See PuELCHES.
Gauls. In Caesar's time the Gauls occupied
the central part, and formed the chief race, of
modern France, which, after them, was called
Gaul. They probably belonged to the Brythonic
division of the Celtic stock, being closely allied
to the ancient Britons, as well as to the modern
Welsh and Bretons, who respectively represent
AN ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
the remnants of the primitive Celtic population
of England and France. It is possible that there
was a still earlier Celtic element in France,
corresponding to the Goidclic division of the
Celtic stock. Mingled with the Celtic element
in the Gauls were traces of the earlier Iberian
and Ligurian aborigines (q.v.). The Gauls were
blue-eyed, fair-haired and long-headed, in dis-
tinction to the older dark-eyed, black-haired,
round-headed type, which is more commonly
known as Celtic, but is probably characteristic
of an older race. Under Roman rule the Gauls
acquired a considerable degree of civilisation.
They were dispossessed in the decline of the
empire by Franks, Burgundians and Visigoths
(q.v.), but became in part ancestors of the
modern French.
Georgians. The chief race of the Southern
Caucasus, a fine athletic race of pure Caucasic
type, noted for the personal beauty of its
individuals. The Georgians were formerly fierce
and warlike, but under Russian rule have become
industrious in the arts of peace. They are noted
for a passionate love of music. They first appear
in history in the time of Alexander the Great,
when they were already settled in their moun-
tains. The Georgian kingdom had an independent
existence for about seven centuries, but suffered
much from Mongolian and especially Turkish
invasions. Georgia and Circassia furnished the
majority of white slaves for Turkish harems.
In 1 80 1 Georgia was annexed to Russia. Other
important South Caucasian races are the
Imerians and the Mingrelians, who closely
resemble the Georgians in physical characteris-
tics, but have displayed less aptitude for
civilisation.
Gepidae. See Goths.
Getee. An ancient race of Thracian (q.v.)
descent, who settled in Wallachia in the fourth
century B.C. They were warlike and turbulent,
but were conquered by Trajan and incorporated
in the Roman Empire. In later centuries they
appear to have been fused with the Goths (q.v.).
Germans. The Germans first appear in history
as a multitude of independent and warlike
tribes living amongst the dense forests which
stretched in Roman times from the Rhine to
the Vistula. They belonged to the Teutonic
stock of the Aryan family. They were a tall and
vigorous race, with long, fair hair and fierce
blue eyes, who delighted in war and the chase.
Their democratic social organisation has greatly
influenced all Teutonic history ; their love of
liberty was a passion. At an early period they
were divided into High and Low Germans,
differing in type, according as they inhabited
the central and southern portions of modern
Germany or the low-lying lands towards the
North Sea and the Baltic. The chief races of the
former were the Goths, Franks, Burgundians,
Swiss, Swabians, Austrians ; of the latter,
Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Frisians, Flemings,
Batavi — from whom the modern English and
Dutch are descended, whilst the High Germans
represent the modern Germans. These are a
very enterprising, thorough, and industrious
race, alike in war and peace, and have thus given
birth to one of the greatest Powers of the modern
world.
Ghilzais. See Afghans.
Gilyaks. A Siberian Mongolia race of
Saghalien.
Gipsies. A nomadic race, which was first
described as appearing in Europe in the fifteenth
century, and is now found in nearly all civilised
countries. At first they were believed to come
from Egypt, and their name is a corruption of
" Egyptians." They have a dark, tawny skin,
black hair and eyes, are small-handed and often
very handsome, and live by tinkering, basket-
making, fortune-telling, and other arts which
can be practised on the road. Their chief
characteristic is independence and love of a
wandering life. Their origin is still uncertain ;
though their language, Romany, is known to be
a corrupt dialect of Hindi, which supports the
older theory that they are of Indian descent. A
later and well-supported theory is that they are
the descendants of the prehistoric race which
introduced metal-working into Europe. On this
view they must have existed in Europe from
time immemorial, without being noticed in
literature. The gipsy problem still awaits
solution.
Goajiris. See Tupi-Guarani.
Golden Hordes. See Kipchaks,
Gonaquas. Hottentot Negro half breeds on
Kafirland frontier.
Goads. See Dravidas.
Goths. One of the chief Teutonic races of
ancient times, who played a great part in
European history from the third to the eighth
century, but have left no descendants as a
distinct race. They first appear in history in
the third century, as a confederation of German
tribes who had made a settlement in the district
north of the Lower Danube. They soon split up
into two distinct peoples, the East Goths or
Ostrogoths, and the West Goths or Visigoths.
There was a third and unimportant race of
Moesogoths, settled in Moesia, for whom Ulfilas
made his famous translation of the Scriptures.
The Goths were extremely warlike and aggres-
sive, a typical race of German warriors. The
Ostrogoths remained north of the Danube,
where they were subjugated for a time by the
Huns of Attila. Recovering their independence,
they invaded Italy, destroyed the Western
Empire, and established a new kingdom under
Theodoric. This was conquered by the Byzantine
Narses in 552, after which the Ostrogoths dis-
appear from history. The Visigoths, unwilling
to submit to the Huns, crossed the Danube and
settled in the Roman Empire, where they fur-
nished many recruits for the army. In 395
they rebelled, and under Alaric invaded Italy
and besieged Rome. Afterwards they founded
kingdoms in the south of Gaul and in Spain,
where the Visigoths ruled till the invasion of
the Saracens, and where their blood is still found
incorporated with that of the older races. A
branch of the Ostrogoths which settled in the
Crimea preserved its nationality and language
down to the sixteenth century, or even
later. The Bastarnas, Gepidae, and perhaps the
Vandals (q.v.), were branches of the Gothic
race.
Greeks, (i) For ancient Greeks, see Hel-
lenes. (2) The modern Greeks are partly
descendants of ancient Greeks, with a large
admixture of Albanian, Wallachian and Slavonic
elements. They are great in commerce, but not
warlike.
Griquas. A race of Hottentot-Dutch half-
breeds, also known as Bastaards, in Griqualand.
329
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Guaicuris. Central American Indians of
Lower California.
Guanches. Aborigines of Canary Islands :
so-called " White Africans," probably of Berber
Hamitic stock.
Guatemalans. White natives of Guatemala,
in Central America, of Spanish descent.
Guatusas. Central American Indians of Costa
Rica.
Guebres. See Parsees.
Gujeratis. Natives of Gujerat in Western
India, Aryans of Hindu stock.
Gurkas. The dominant race of Nepal, who
claim a Hindu (Aryan) origin, but have probably
acquired a Mongoloid tinge from inter-marriages.
They are of small stature, yet eminently warlike,
and supply some of the best troops to our Indian
Army.
Gypsies. See Gipsies.
Hadendowas. See Bejas.
Haidas. North American Indians in British
Columbia.
Hamites. A family of Caucasic Man, belong-
ing to the Melanochroid or dark type, ranging
in colour from white to brown, and even black ;
hair soft, straight or wavy ; skull, medium
(mesocephalic) ; square- jawed (orthognathous) ;
generally of fine physical development. Divided
into Eastern Hamites — e.g., Somali, and Western
Hamites — e.g., Berbers and Basques. Closely
related to Semites.
Hau-Khoin. See Hereros.
Hausas. The most important Sudanese Negro
race of Northern Nigeria. Keen traders, phy-
sically well developed, they make excellent
soldiers, and are largely utilised for this purpose
by their British rulers. The Hausa States were
over-run by the Hamitic Fulahs (q.v.) about
i8{)o-i8io, and now form part of the Empire
of Sokoto. The Hausa language is the common
medium of commerce in the Central Sudan.
Hawaiians. Natives of Hawaii, of brown
Polynesian stock, akin to Maoris. A remarkably
fine and handsome race, steadily decreasing
since contact with European civilisation and
diseases. Peculiarly subject to leprosy.
Haytians. Natives of the negro republic of
Hayti, descended from negro slaves imported
by the earlier Spanish and French owners, who
freed themselves at the time of the French
Revolution. The Spanish portion afterwards
formed the Dominican Republic in the eastern
part of the island. Of mixed Bantu and Sudanese
Xcgro descent, with a cross of white blood.
Hazaras. Mountaineers of N.W. Afghanistan,
a vigorous and turbulent race of Mongolo-Persian
descent, often troublesome to British India.
Hebrews. See Jews.
Hellenes. Inhabitants of ancient Greece,
which they called Hellas. The Proto-Hellenes, or
aborigines, were probably of Pelasgian origin,
belonging to the Western Hamitic family, of
whom the ancient Cretans and Mycena^ans (q.v.)
may represent the ancestral type. These were
followed by the true Hellenes — Acha;ans or
Argives — divided into three main branches —
Dorians, lonians, and .^olians. Later they were
divided into many local states, such as Athens
and Sparta. The modern Greeks are in part
descended from the Hellenes, crossed with
Albanian, Wallachian, and Turkish blood. It is
to the Hellenes that we owe the first important
developments of civilisation in Europe.
Helveti. Ancient inhabitants of Switzerland
in Caesar's time, probably a German tribe,
from whom the modern Swiss are in part de-
scended.
Hereros, or Ovaherero. Bantu Negroes inhabit-
ing the plains of Damaraland, or German South-
West Africa. The Damaras or Hau-Khoin are
a cross between Hereros and the Hottentot
aborigines. A pastoral nation who migrated
thither about two centuries ago from the inland
districts, and dispossessed the aboriginal Hotten-
tots, now represented by the Namas of Namaqua-
land, with whom they are perennially at war.
Recently they rose against the German authori-
ties, and have given them much trouble. A
fine, warlike race.
Highlanders. The Gaelic-speaking inhabitants
of Northern Scotland, a branch of the Goidelic
or Q Kelts, also known as Gaels. They are
descended from the ancient Scots [q.v.), who
originally migrated from Ireland in the fifth
century. One of the finest races of the British
Islands, who give them their finest soldiers
Himyarites. A branch of the Semitic family
(" Red Men," whence the Red Sea), formerly
occupying Arabia Felix and Abyssinia ; they
form the main stock of the Abyssinian race.
They included the kingdoms of the Mina^ans
and Saba;ans, the latter being identified bv some
with the Biblical Sheba.
Hindus. A stock of the Aryan family, com-
prising a large proportion of the natives of India,
described under the headings of Kashmiris,
Punjabis, Rajputs, Marathas, Bengalis, Sindis,
Gujeratis, Assamis, etc The original Hindus
entered India — hence called Hindustan — from
the north-west at some prehistoric time, and
soon became the predominant race in the
peninsula.
Hittites. A forgotten but once mighty people
of Semitic race, who contested the entry of the
Israelites into Canaan, and waged war with
Egypt and Assyria for many centuries. Little
is known about them, but they seem to have
reared a mighty empire between Lebanon and
the Euphrates, which endured for more than a
thousand years, and was destroyed by the
Assyrian Sargon II. in 717 b.c.
Hondurans. White natives of Honduras, of
Spanish descent ; few in numbers, the popula-
tion being mostly of mixed blood.
Hor-Soks. A primitive Mongol-Turki race of
the Tibetan plateau.
Hottentots, or Khoi-Khoin. The aboriginal
Negro inhabitants of South Africa, which they
shared with the Bushmen (q.v.). Possibly the
Bushmen are degraded Hottentots, or the
Hottentots are a cross between the Bantus from
the north and the Bushmen, who would on
this view be the true aborigines. The only
surviving race of pure Hottentots are the Namas
of Namaqualand : the Damaras, Griquas,
Gonaquas, and Koranas, are other races in which
Hottentot blood is mixed with that of Bantu
Negroes or of Europeans (mostly Boers). The
Hottentots are a distinct branch of the Negro
family, marked by extremely long heads and
high cheek-bones, a brownish-yellow com-
plexion, with other physical peculiarities exem-
plified in the so-called " Hottentot Venus,"
and also found in the Bushmen. Their
language is peculiar for its unique " clicks,"
which no European can pronounce, and which
AN ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
seem to stand between articulate and inarticu-
late speech.
Hovas. The dominant Malagasy race of Mada-
gascar, of Malay descent, mixed with Bantu
Negro blood from Africa. They stand nearest to
pure Malays of all Malagasy peoples. The
existing French Protectorate was only estab-
lished after much fighting with the warlike Hovas,
who had conquered all the other native tribes.
Huastec. See Maya-Quiche.
Hungarians. See Magyars.
Huns. A nomad race of the Northern Mon-
golic family, probably of Turki stock, who
settled in tlie neighbourhood of the Volga and
the Urals about the dawn of the Christian era.
In the fourth century they conquered and dis-
possessed the Ostrogoths and Visigoths on the
Danube. Under Attila, in the fifth century,
they invaded Greece and Gaul, and pushed their
arms as far as Rome, which was only saved by
the diplomacy of the Pope. Their cruel fierceness
in war caused their great leader to be known as
the Scourge of God. Like the Mongols, they
were essentially a race of horsemen, and their
" deformed figures and hideous Mongolic faces "
added to the terror which they inspired. After
Attila's death in 453 the Huns fell to pieces, and
soon were absorbed into other nations — especi-
ally, perhaps, the Bulgars.
Hunzas. See Dards.
Hupas. See Athabascan.
Hurons, or Wyandots. A North American
Indian race of Iroquoian stock, formerly
inhabiting the shores of Lake Huron.
Hyksos. A Northern Mongolic race who
invaded Egypt and established the dynasty of
the Shepherd kings about 2000 B.C.
Ibeas. A Negro race which recently invaded
the Cameroons from the East : they bring down
ivory from the unexplored interior. Either
Bantu, or Sudanese ^perhaps connected with
the Azandch (q.v.).
Iberi, or Iberians. An ancient race of Western
Hamites, related to the fair Berbers of Mauritania.
The Basques are probably descended from them,
and there is good reason for identifying them
with the Picts of Scotland and the Irish aborigin«;s.
Ibo. See Abo.
Icelanders. Inhabitants of Iceland, originally
Norwegians, who settled there about the end of
the ninth century. A typical tall, fair-haired,
blue-eyed Scandinavian race. The Icelandic
Sagas form the chief part of ancient Scandinavian
literature.
Idumaeans or Edomites. A warlike Semitic
race of Canaanite stock, thought to be descended
from Esau, who were conquered by the Israelites
under Saul and David, and again by Judas
Maccabaeus in 165 b.c, after which they dis-
■ appear from history.
Ife. See Yorubas.
Igorrotes. An industrious agricultural race
of the Philippine Islands. Indonesians of Malay
descent, with a possible Chinese or Japanese
element.
Illinois Indians. See Algonquian.
Illyrians. A savage piratical race of the
eastern Adriatic sea-board, who were conquered
by the Romans, and were the last of the Balkan
peoples to be civilised. Probably the modern
Albanians are descended from them, and they
were among the first Aryan immigrants to
Europe.
Ilocanos. A Malay race of the Philippine
Islands.
Imerians. See Georgians.
Incas. The chief of the six Indian races, in-
cluding the Quichuas and the warlike Chancas,
which formerly occupied the central mountain-
region of Peru. The Incas became the dominant
race about 1000 a.d., and built up a vast and
peaceful civilisation, in which a purely socialistic
government was successfully administered. This
Inca Empire was destroyed by the Spanish
Hiider Pizarro in 1533, but the Inca Indians
still survive as a race in Central Peru,
where they are known as industrious and honest
agriculturists.
Indians. Native races (i) of India; (2) of
North, Central, and South America.
Indo-Chinese. A section of the Southern
Mongolic family, inhabiting the countries between
India and China.
Indo-European, Indo-German. See Aryan.
Indonesians. The light-coloured, non-Malay
inhabitants of the Eastern Archipelago and South
Sea Islands, who are of Caucasic type, and are
mostly brown-skinned Polynesians (q.v.). ^ They
also include the Batjans of Batjan I., the Burus,
Korongui, and Suvu of the Malay Archipelago,
and the Mentawey Islanders (q.v.).
Ingushis. See Chechenzes.
Innuits. See Eskimos.
lonians. (i) One of the three main Hellenic
races of ancient Greece. (2) Greek inhabitants
of the coast districts and islands of Western Asia
Minor, forming the Ionian League, who passed
in the sixth century b.c. under the Persian sway.
Iowa Indians. See Siouan.
Iranians. Ancient inhabitants of the Asian
plateau bounded by the Indus, the Tigris,
and the Hindu Kush. A stock of the Aryan
family, now including Persians, Afghans, Balu-
chis, Kurds, and Armenians (q-v.).
Irish. ( I ) The aborigines of Ireland, probably
Iberians (q.v.). (2) The later Erse-speaking
inhabitants of Ireland, a branch of the Goidelic
or Q Celts. (3) Modern inhabitants of Ireland,
mostly Celtic, but largely mixed with Teutonic
elements in the north.
Iroquoian. One of the families of North
American Indians, including the Iroquois, or
" Six Nations," who comprised the RIohawks,
Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, Tuscaroras and
Cayugas ; the Hurons, or Wyandots, including
the Eries, and the Cherokees. Their territory
was Upper Canada, round the great lakes.
New York, and the Virginian Highlands, and they
played a large part in the Franco-British war-
fare of the eighteenth century. They are now
few in numbers and confined to Indian Reser-
vations in the U.S. and Canada.
Israelites. See Jews.
Italians, (i) Ancient inhabitants of Italy,
of Ligurian stock, probably Eastern Hamites,
related to the Pelasgians [see Latins and
Romans]. (2) Modern Italians, mostly of Latin
stock, crossed with Teutonic (Gothic and Lom-
bard) blood.
Italic. A stock of the Aryan family, including
ancient and modern Italians (with ancient
Romans), modern French, Spanish, Portuguese,
and Roumanian, with Latin (Spanish and
Portuguese) Americans.
Jallonke. See Mandingan.
Jangalis. An aboriginal Indian tribe, in*
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
habiting the forest district north of Cuttack —
the most primitive race in all India. Perhaps
an early Dra vidian (q.v.) stock.
Japanese. A race of the Northern Mongolian
family, probably originating in Korea, whence
they spread to Japan and dispossessed the Ainu
aborigines, about the dawn of the Clu-istian era.
The most enterprising and civilised people in
Asia, often called " the English of the Far East."
They possess a singularly high standard of honour
and patriotism, which was the main factor in
their recent victory over Russia, and they are
eminently warlike, besides producing industrious
agriculturists and enterprising traders. Of
short but sturdy stature, white skin and yellow
or sallowish complexion, oblique eyes, black hair.
Jats. A numerous agricultural race of the
Punjab in North-west India. They are probably
of an ArA'an stock, but ethnologists disagree as to
their history, assigning them ancient Scythian in-
vaders, the Rajputs, or the Gipsies, for ancestors.
Javanese. A IMalay race inhabiting Java,
where they dispossessed the Negrito aborigines
[see Kalangs] in prehistoric times. The Sun-
danese and Madurese are allied tribes, possessing
parts of the island of Java, now under Dutch rule.
Jebus. See Yorubas.
Jews, Hebrews, or Israelites. The most im-
portant of Semitic races, of the ancient Canaanite
stock. The Israelites descended from Abraham,
who came from Mesopotamia to Canaan about
2000 B.C. ; thence they migrated to Egypt, and
returned to take possession of Palestine. Their
history is familiar to all from the Bible. After the
Roman capture of Jerusalem under Titus, 70 a.d.,
the Jews — as they were now called — were dis-
persed though the world, but they have retained
their racial characteristics in remarkable purity
through long persecutions, and now play a
great part in the commerce and finance of nearly
all civilised countries, though they have no
national unity or racial home.
Jivaros. South American Indians in Peru,
on the head-waters of the Amazon.
Jolofs. See Wolofs.
Jutes. Early inhabitants of Jutland, a Low
German branch of Teutonic stock, who invaded
England in the fifth century and made the first
Teutonic settlement in that country, in Kent.
Kabards. A Western Caucasian race, allied
to the Circassians {q.v.) and presenting a high
standard of physical beauty.
Kabyles. See Berbers.
Kacbaris. Natives of the Terai at the foot of
the Himalayas, belonging to the Tibetan stock of
the Southern Mongolic family.
Kafirs, or Kaffirs. Generic name of the fierce
and warlike Bantu Negro races which occupied
the south-eastern seaboard of South Africa when
Europeans first colonised that country. They
then held all the coast lands from the Gamboos
to the Limpopo. The southern part (Kaffraria)
belonged to the Kafirs proper, and the northern
(Zululand) to the Zulus, an allied race, but usually
distinguished from the Kafirs, or Ama-Xosa,
whose chief tribes are Galekas, Gaikas and
Tembus (q.v.). Throughout the greater part of
the nineteenth century the English settlers
were engaged in constant Kafir wars, which
resulted in the gradual subjugation of both
Katirs and Zulus.
Kafirs. Fair-skinned mountaineers of Kafiri-
stan, between the Kabul River and Hindu Kush.
332
An offshoot of the Aryan family, thought by
some to be descendants in part of the Greek
troops with which Alexander the Great invaded
India.
Kakhyens. A race of freebooters, inhabiting
the northern frontiers of Burma, whence they
raid the more civilised agriculturists of the plains
and levy blackmail. A Southern Mongolic race
of Indo-Chinese stock.
Kalangs. A recently extinct Negrito race of
Java, remnants of the aborigines of that island ;
small, black and woolly-haired, with very
retreating forehead and projecting jaws. The
most ape-like of human beings, and the nearest
approach yet found to the " missing link "
between man and ape. They belonged to the
Oceanic Negro family.
Kalmuks. The Western IMongol stock of the
Northern Mongolic family, scattered through
Central Asia, and extending into Southern
Russia. Nomadic pastors, owning large flocks
and herds, and living in tents on the great
steppes, they include the tribes of the Chorasses,
Turguts, Khoshots, and Durbats. A large horde
of Kalmuks invaded Russia in 1650, and settled
there for a century, but in 177 1 most of them
were expelled, and endured great sufferings on
the march to China, so brilliantly described by
De Quincy. These were mainly Khoshots and
Durbats.
Kamchadales. A Siberian branch of the
Northern Mongolic family, inhabiting Kam-
chatka ; a hardy race of hunters and fishers.
Kanakas. A name given to South Sea Is-
landers, generally by sailors and traders, and
especially to Polynesian labourers imported
to Queensland.
Kanakas, or Bakana&a. Negro aborigines
of Angola, probably akin to the Bushmen.
Other similar tribes are the Korokas, Kulabes,
Kwandes and Kwisses.
Kanarese. Mongoloid aborigines of Mysore
in India. See Dravidians.
Kanembu, Kanuris. See Lake Chad Group.
Kara-Kalpaks, or Black Bonnets. A branch of
the Turki stock of the Northern Mongolic family,
dwelling on the south-east of the Aral Sea and
in the Oxus basin. A pacific pastoral race,
dominated by their warlike relatives, the nomadic
Kirghiz, and now subject to Russia.
Kara-Kirghiz. See Kirghiz.
Karelians. An Eastern branch of Baltic
Finns dwelling in the eastern parts of Finland
and adjoining provinces of Russia. Probably
a Slavo-Mongolic mixture in which the original
Mongolic element has been largely eliminated.
Karens. Inhabitants of Burma, of the Indo-
Chinese branch of the Southern Mongolic family..
Largely Christianised. Formerly oppressed by
the Burmans, than whom they are less clever,
but more industrious. Agriculturists.
Karons. A Negrito race of New Guinea, of
very degraded type, and addicted to canni-
balism.
Kargos. See Nuba Group.
Kashmiris. Natives of Kashmir, belonging
to the Hindu branch of the Aryan family. Of
fine ph\'si(|ue, but corrupt and untrustworthy.
Kassonke. See Mandingan.
Kazaks. See Kirghiz.
Kelts, or Celts. A stock of the Aryan family
which settled in France and the British Islands
in prehistoric times. The Gauls and Belgae of
A RED INDIAN CHIEF AND HIS FAMILY
Un-.icrwood & Unilcrwood
3S5
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Caesar's time and the early Britons represent
them. They are divided into two branches, Goi-
dehc and Brythonic Celts, respectively known
also as Q and P Celts, from a linguistic pecu-
liarity. The former are represented in modern
times by Irish, Manx, and Scottish Highlanders ;
the latter by Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons. The
typical Celt was probably a tall, broad-headed
individual, with prominent nose, high cheek-
bones, light hair and eyes. The small, round-
headed, dark race which is also classed as Celtic,
is more probably an earlier Hamitic type, allied
to the Basques {q.v.).
Khulkas. A nomadic race of Eastern Mongols,
occupying the Gobi desert.
Khamtis. An Assamese race — Indo-Chinese
stock of Southern Mongolic family — in the
Brahmaputra Valley.
Khasis. An Indo-Chinese hill tribe of Southern
Mongolic family, in Khasi Hills of Assam.
Khoi-Khoin. The name given to themselves
by the Hottentots (q.v.).
Khoshots. See Kalmuks.
Kickapoos. See Algonquian.
Kiowas. A North American Indian race in
Oklahoma.
Kipchaks. A Turki race of Northern Mongolic
family, settled in eleventh century between
Urals and Don. In the middle of the thirteenth
century, Batu Khan, a son of Genghiz Khan, led
them to conquer all Central and South Russia,
where they founded the Empire of the Golden
Horde. It was broken up by Tamerlane about
1390, and from its fragments arose the Khanates
of Astrakhan, the Crimea, etc., now absorbed by
Russia. From the Eastern Kipchaks are des-
cended the Kirghiz (q.v.), one of whose hordes is
still known as Kipchak. The modern Kipchaks
are nomadic, and live by stock-feeding in the
steppes of western Turkestan.
Kirantis. A Tibetan race of East Nepal, of
Southern Mongolic family.
Kirghiz. A nomadic people of Central Asia,
where they occupy the vast steppes which lie to
the north of Turkestan. They are descended
from the Kipchaks (q.v) of the Golden Horde.
They form a group of the Turki stock of the
Northern Mongolic family. The Kara- Kirghiz,
who inhabit the uplands between the Issik-Kul
and the Kucn-Lun, are the oldest Turki nomads
of whom there is any historical record, and are
divided into On and Sol — right and left wings.
The Kirghiz proper, who call themselves Kazaks,
or " riders," roam from Lake Balicash to the
Volga, over the vast level steppes, where they
dwell in skin tents and support themselves by
breeding camels, horses, oxen, sheep and goats.
They live in the saddle, and were formerly a
warlike people, who once could put 400,000
fighting men in the field. They are divided into
four hordes — Great, Middle or Kipchak, Little,
and Inner. They are all now under Russian
dominion.
Kishis. See Chechenzes.
Kissis. See Temne Group.
Kizil-Bashis. Persianised Turkis of Afghan-
istan, belonging to Turki branch of Northern
Mongolic family, who supply the chief com-
mercial classes of Afghanistan.
Kolajis. See Nuba Group.
Kolarians. One of the three non-Aryan
races to which the primitive inhabitants of
India belonged, of the Indo-Chinese stocjc of the
334
Southern Mongolic family. They entered Bengal
from the north-east, and are now represented by
a few scattered tribes, like the Santals, Mundas,
Kurkus, and Bhils.
Koranas. See Hottentots.
Koreans. Natives of Korea, belonging to the
Koreo- Japanese stock of the Northern Mongol
family They stand midway between Chinese and
Japanese, the latter being probably their des-
cendants, and are taller, with lighter complexion
and more regular features, than the typical
Mongol. Their civilisation is of Chinese origin.
They are not warlike, but are prosperous
agriculturists.
Korokas. See Kanakas.
Korungas. See Wadai Group.
Koryaks. An Arctic race of North-east
Siberia, allied to the Chukchis (q.v.).
Krcj. See Nilitic Group.
Krim-Tartars. See Tartars.
Krus, or Krooboys. Sudanese Negroes of
Liberian Group. Bold and skilful boatmen,
employed for that purpose all along the West
African Coast.
Kulabes. See Kanakas.
Kulfans, Kunjaras. See Nuba Group.
Kurds. Natives of Kurdistan, partly nomad
and pastoral, partly settled and agricultural.
A fierce and warlike people, they are much given
to raiding, and were utilised by the Sultan to
oppress the Armenians. They have settled in
Kurdistan from time i«imemorial, and belong to
the Iranian stock of the Aryan family.
Kurile Islanders. See Ainus.
Kurinis. See Lesghians.
Kurkus. A broken Kolarian tribe, allied to the
Santals of Central India, belonging to the Indo-
Chinese branch of Southern Mongolic family.
Kutchins. See Athabascan.
Kwandes, Kwisses. See Kanakas.
Ladakhis. Natives of Ladakh in the
Upper Indus Valley, belonging to the Tibetan
stock of the Southern Mongolic family, con-
quered by Kashmir in seventeenth century.
Lake Chad Group. A group of Sudanese
Negro tribes, inhabiting the districts round Lake
Chad, including Kanembus, Kanuris, Baghirmis
(warlike slave-raiders), Mandaras, Yedinas,
Logons, Mosgus, Bulalas, Saras, etc.
Lampongs. Malay inhabitants of Southern
Sumatra.
Lamuts. See Tunguses.
Landumans. Sudanese Negroes of Senegambia.
Laos. See Shans.
Lapps. A branch of the Finno-Ugiian stock
of the Northern Mongolic family, inhabiting the
parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia
collectively known as Lapland. They are the
shortest and broadest-skulled people in Europe.
Most of them are nomads, who live by their vast
reindeer herds, though some have become
settled and live by fishing and hunting. They
are closely allied to the Baltic Finns, and like
them show traces of a mixture of Caucasic
blood .
Lascars. A term applied to sailors of Indian
and Malay seafaring races, employed on British
vessels.
Latins. The ancient inhabitants of Latium,
the district of Central Italy which lay between
the Tiber and the Liris, and included the Roman
Campagna. They absorbed the earlier allied
races of Oscans, Sabines, Samnites, and
AN ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
Umbrians, and formed a league of thirty cities,
which warred for some generations with Rome
and then fell under the Roman dominion. Rome
itself was originally a Latin city. The ancient
population of Italy was divided into three grades :
Roman citizens — not necessarily residents in
Rome — Latins, and Italians. The Latins are a
branch of the Italic stock of the Aryan family
Latin or Romance Races. A name often given
to the modern races which speak a Romance
language derived from Latin, and belong in
whole or part to the Italic stock of the Aryan
family. They include Italians, French (including
Provencals), Spaniards, Portuguese, and Rou-
manians.
Latin Americans. The white inhabitants of
South America, of Spanish or Portuguese descent,
and speaking these languages.
Lazes. See Georgians.
Lencan. A group of semi-civilised Central
American Indian tribes, including Chontals,
Ramas, Payas, Wulwas, and Guatusas.
Lepchas. Natives of Sikkim and Bhutan,
belonging to the Tibetan stock of the Southern
Mongolic family.
Lesghians. A branch of the Eastern stock
of the Caucasian family, inhabiting the Eastern
Caucasus. Wild mountain tribes, who long
offered an unavailing resistance to the Russian
arms under Shamyl (1859). Their chief tribes
are the Avars (the most cultivated and powerful),
Andis, Dargos, Didis and Kurinis.
Lettic. A stock of the Aryan family, includ-
ing Letts, Lithuanians and the extinct Pruczi,
Borussians, or Old Prussians, from whom
modern Prussia takes its name. The Letts and
Lithuanians in the fifteenth century formed a
united people, inhabiting the south-west of
Russia, from Courland to Odessa. Afterwards
they passed under Polish and then Russian
dominion. They are now mostly peasant
agriculturists. They are fair and well-built,
with fine features and blue eyes.
Letts. See Lettic.
Liberian Group. Sudanese Negro tribes, in-
habiting the Grain Coast of West Africa. The
Krus or Krooboys (q.v.), Queahs and Bassas
are their chief tribes.
Liberians. Natives of the negro republic of
Liberia on the Guinea Coast, partly descended
from freed slaves of all races, but mainly belong-
ing to the Liberian group.
Libyans. An ancient fair-haired and light-
skinned race of Northern Africa, akin to the
modern Berbers, belonging to the western
stock of the Hamitic family. They are depicted
on Egyptian monuments of fifteenth century B.C.
Ligures, or Ligurians. An ancient race of
the western stock of the Hamitic family, probably
the aborigines of North-West Italy round Genoa,
to whom the Siculi, Sards and Corsicans were
apparently akin. ,
Limbas. See Temne Group.
Lithuanians. See Lettic.
Livonians. A branch of Baltic Finns, belong-
ing to the Finno-Ugrian stock of the Northern
Mongolic family ; a dwindled remnant now
inhabits the Baltic provinces of Russia.
Logons. See Lake Chad Group.
Lolos. A fair-complexioned aboriginal race
on the frontiers of China and Tibet, belonging to
the Chinese stock of the Southern Mongolic
family.
Lombards. A race of Teutonic stock, formerly
settled in the district of the Lower Elbe, who
invaded Italy in 568, and there founded a power-
ful Lombard kingdom uhder Alboin and his
successors. The Lombards were at first fierce
warriors and little more ; but they soon fell
under the influence of Italian civilisation, and
were merged into the Italian race when Charle-
magne destroyed their independence in 774.
Their name and some traces of their racial
character still remain in Lombardy, between the
Alps and the Po.
Luchuans. Natives of the Luchu or Liu-Kiu
Archipelago, between Japan and Formosa,
resembling the Japanese, but with differences
which are attributed to a cross of the aboriginal
Ainu blood. They belong to the Koreo- Japanese
stock of the Northern Mongolic family.
Lushais. A warlike race of Tibetan stock
inhabiting the Lushai Hills on the confines of
Assam, Bengal and Burma.
Mabas. See Wadai Group.
Macedonians. A warlike people of ancient
Greece, who attained their greatest power under
Alexander the Great. They were not true
Hellenes, but a race of wild mountain tribes
probably of Hamitic origin. Modern Macedonia
is peopled by an extremely mixed race of Greeks,
Bulgarians, Turks, etc., among whom some
descendants of the ancient Macedonians may
no doubt be found.
Macusis. See Caries.
Madis. See Nilitic Group.
Madurese. A Malay race inhabiting Java,
and allied to the Javanese {q.v.).
Magars. A Tibetan tribe of Western Nepal
Magwangwaras. A fierce predatory race of
Bantu Negroes, occupying the head-waters of
the Rovuma River in East Central Africa.
Magyars. A warlike and now highly civilised
race belonging to the Finno-Ugrian stock of
the Northern Mongolic family. They first
appeared in Europe about a thousand years
ago, being probably Scythian (q.v.) immigrants
from the Caspian district. They conquered the
Roman provinces of Pannonia and Dacia, and
there founded the Kingdom of Hungary in the
year 1000. They are still the dominant race in
Hungary, which now forms part of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, and preserve their Finno-
Ugrian speech. They are a chivalrous and
highly intelligent race, whose Mongolic descent
is no longer perceptible in their white skins and
regular, often handsome features. Probably
this is due to frequent crossing of blood with
German, Slav and Roumanian neighbours.
Mahrattas. See Marathis.
Makololos. A warlike branch of the Basuto
race of Bantu Negroes who, in 1835, moved
north and conquered the Barotses, only to be
reduced by them to vassalage about 1 864.
Makuas. A savage cannibal race of Bantu
Negroes, living north of the Zambesi in Portu-
guese East Africa.
Malagasy. A Malayo- African people of mixed
blood, inhabiting Madagascar. The Hovas
(q.v.) are the dominant tribe.
Malays. The dominant native race of Malay-
sia, the chief stock of the Oceanic Mongolic
family. They are of a distinctly Mongolic
physical type, of low stature and yellowish colour,
with high cheek-bones, black lank hair and
broad skulls. They may be divided into three
335
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
races : the Orang-Benua, or men of the soil,
the indigenous Malay tribes at a low stage of
culture ; the Orang-Laut, or men of the sea,
who live by fishing and piracy ; and the Orang-
Malayu, or civilised Malays proper. They in-
habit the southern provinces of Sumatra, the
native states of the Malay Peninsula (Kelantan,
etc.), the British Straits Settlements (Johor,
Perak, Selangor, etc.), parts of Borneo, Ternate,
Tidor and the Banda Islands, and many islands
of the Malay Archipelago. They have wandered
as far as Madagascar, where the Malagasy (q-v.)
are Malays crossed with Negro blood. They
were formerly warlike and much given to
piracy, but are now the chief trading race of
South-eastern Asia. Their origin is dubious,
but Sumatra is generally regarded as their
original home. Of kindred blood are many so-
called Proto-Malay races, such as the Achinese,
Javanese, Sundanese, Dyaks, etc. {q-v.).
Malayalim. See Dravidians.
Manchus. The dominant native race of
Manchuria, who conquered China in the seven-
teenth century and founded the existing Chinese
dynasty. They are of the Mongol stock of the
Northern Mongolic family. They first appear
in history in the thirteenth century, when a
. number of nomad Manchu tribes were formed
into a single people. They probably originated
in Siberia, where the Tunguses (q.v.) represent
their primitive stock.
Mandans. See Siouan.
Mandaras. See Lake Chad Group.
Mandingans. The chief race of Sudanese
Negroes in the Western Sudan, with numerous
branches between the Upper Niger and the
coast, including Mande or Mandingoes, Bam-
baras, Jallonkes, Kassonkes, Masinas, Sarakoles,
Solimas, Susus, etc. Timbuctoo was formerly
the capital of the Mandingan empire, before it
fell under Berber domination. A large propor-
tion of American Negroes are descended from
slaves of Mandingan origin.
Mangbattu. Sudanese negroes of Welle group,
noted for their pronounced cannibalism.
Mangkassara. Malay natives of Macassar,
in Celebes, under Dutch rule.
Manipuris. Natives of Manipur, between
Burma and Assam, mostly wild hillmen of
mixed Burmese and Hindu blood, but classed
with the Indo-Chinese stock of the Southern
Mongolic family.
Man-Tses. Inhabitants of the mountain dis-
tricts of Sze-chuenin China, akintoLolos (q.v.). m
Manx or Manxmen. Inhabitants of the Isle
of Man, belonging to the Celtic stock of the
Aryan family, and the Goidelic or Q Celt
branch of it. There is a strong Scandinavian
element in their blood, from the numerous
invasions of the old Norse pirates Their
customs are also strongly marked by the Scan-
dinavian element.
Manyuemas. Warlike Bantu Negroes of the
Upper Congo, long allied with the Arab slave-
traders.
Maoris. The aborigines of New Zealand,
belonging to the tall brown race of Polynesians
{q.v.), a branch of the Indonesian family. A
brave, generous and warlike people, who are said
to have reached New Zealand from the Pacific
islands about a thousand years ago, they are
one of the few native races which promise to
assimilate western civilisation with success.
336
Marathis, or Mahrattas. A numerous Indian
race of mixed origin, probably of aboiiginal
(Dravidian) blood in the main, with a Hindu
element. They inhabit West and Central India,
where they became the dommant power under
Sivaji in the seventeenth century. The English
had long and bloody contests with these wild
and warlike mountaineers, who founded several
great native states, some of which (Gwalior and
Indore) survive to this day.
■ Maronites. A sturdy, warlike Christian race
of mountaineers in the Lebanon, belonging to
the Syrian branch of the Aramaean stock of the
Semitic family. Implacable foes of the Druses,
with whom they are constantly at war.
Marquesans. See Polynesians.
Masais. A branch of the Eastern Hamites,
settled in British East Africa on the Tana River.
A finely-built race, whom only their chocolate
colour and frizzy hair prevent from passing for
Europeans. Extremely warlike and intelligent,
they are confirmed raiders and cattle lifters.
Mashonas. Natives of Mashonaland, in South-
eastern Rhodesia, formerly the half-fabulous
empire of the Monomotapa, and the home of a
forgotten civilisation, to which the ruins of Zim-
babye and other similar relics bear witness.
The Mashonas are Bantu Negroes, a peaceful,
industrious people, who were subjugated about
1838 by the Matabeles under Umsilikatzi, and
are now under British rule.
Massachusett Indians. See Algonquian.
Massalits. See Wadai Group.
Matabeles. A branch of the Zulu race of
Bantu Negroes, which was expelled from Zulu-
land in 1838, and conquered the Mashonas, in
modern Rhodesia, under LTmsilikatzi. Like the
Zulus, they were proud and fearless warriors,
who were only subjugated with difficulty by
the English in 1893, and revolted unsuccessfully
in 1896.
Matacoans. A South American Indian race
on the Vermejo River in Argentine.
Mauri. See Moors.
Maviti. Bantu Negroes of the Upper Shire
in British South Central Africa, of Zulu stock,
who came as conquerors from the south.
Maya-Quiche. A group of Central American
Indian races, mostly in Yucatan and Guatemala.
It includes the Mayas of Yucatan, Zendals and
Zotzils of Chiapas, Quiches, Chols, Pokomans, and
Zutugils of Guatemala, Huastecs and Totonacs
of Vera Cruz. Like the Aztecs, the Mayas
possessed an ancient civilisation and system of
picture writing.
Maypuris. See Arawaks.
Mbengas. Indigenous Bantu Negroes of French
Equatorial Africa, about Corisco Bay.
Melanesians. The indigenous natives of the
Western Pacific Islands, forming a distinct stock
of the Oceanic Negro family of Ethiopic Man.
They are long-skulled, or dolichocephalic, with
the lowest cephalic index of all known races,
prognathous, broad-nosed, of a sooty-black
colour, with black frizzy hair, and of low stature.
They are at a low stage of culture, being very
savage, bloodthirsty, and treacherous, mostly
cannibals and head-hunters, with little social
organisation. They include the Fijians and the
natives of the New Hebrides, the Solomon,
Admiralty, Bismarck, and Loyalty Islands, New
Britain, New Ireland, New Caledonia, and other
islands of the Eastern Pacific. They are closely
AN ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
allied to the Papuans (^.v.), under which name
some ethnologists prefer to class the whole body
of jMcIancsians.
Melanochroi. A suggested division of Caucasic
Man, in which a pale skin is typically accompanied
by dark hair and eyes ; it would thus include
the Hamitic and Semitic families, with the
Hellenic, Italic, and Celtic stocks of the Aryan
family.
Mendis. See Temne Group.
Mentawey Islanders. A remnant of the
aboriginal Polynesian race dispossessed by the
IMalays, off the coast of Sumatra.
Mestizos. Cross-breeds between Europeans
and Indians, in Spanish and Portuguese America.
Mexicans. See Aztecs and Nahuans. Also the
modern inhabitants of Mexico, who are of Spanish
descent, with a strong infusion of Indian blood.
Micmacs. An Indian race of Nova Scotia,
in whom some ethnologists think that a trace of
Norse blood, dating from the pre-Columbian
discovery of America, is perceptible.
Minaeans. See Himyarites.
Mingrelians. See Georgians.
Minh-huongs. Franco-Annamese half-breeds
in Cochin China, an increasing race who make
very valuable colonists.
Minnetarees. See Siouan.
Mishmis. A wild Tibetan hill tribe occupying
the jungle-covered hills through which the
Brahmaputra flows, on the northern border of
Assam. Warlike and turbulent.
Missouri Indians. See Siouan.
Mixtecs. An ancient Mexican race, contem-
porary with the Toltecs {q.v.), probably repre-
sented bv the modern Miztecs of Oajaca.
Moabites. An ancient pastoral race of Semitic
origin, ethnologically cognate with the Israelites,
who dwelt on the east of the Dead Sea, and are
now extinct.
Moesogoths. See Goths.
Mohawks. See Iroquoian.
Mohicans. One of the most famous and war-
like of redskin races, immortalised by Fenimore
Cooper. See Algonquian.
Mojos, or Moxos. A yellowish Indian race of
Bolivia, akin to the Chiquitos.
Mokis. See Shoshonean.
Mongolic. One of the four great divisions of
mankind. Typically characterised by yellowish
skin, broad, flat features with prominent cheek-
bones, broad skulls, mesognathous jaws, and
oblique, almond-shaped eyes, with black, lank
and coarse hair. The Manchus are a typical
Mongolic race. The Mongolic races are mostly
found in Asia, which is chiefly peopled by their
stocks. The name " Mongolic " has replaced the
older " Turanian."
Mongols. A stock of the Northern Mongolic,
otherwise known as Mongolo-Tartar or Ural-
Altaic, family, from whom the general term
of Mongolic is derived. The name seems origin-
ally to have meant " brave," and the Mongols
have provided some of the most fierce and war-
like races of history. They originated as scattered
tribes in modern Mongolia. Under Genghiz Khan
they were formed into a confederacy which con-
quered the whole of Central Asia in the thirteenth
century, thanks to an unlimited supply of hardy
and very mobile horsemen. The existing Mongol
tribes, nomad pastors of Mongolia in Central
.'Xsia, are divided into Sharras or Eastern Kal-
?2
muks, or Western Buriats, or Siberian Mongols,
and Tunguses, including JVIanchus (q.v.).
Montenegrins. A Servian race of civilised
mountaineers, inhabiting the rugged district
of Montenegro ; the only Balkan race which
preserved independence and Christianity against
the Turkish conquerors. Their history is one of
constant warfare with the Turks, and they have
thus preserved the primitive virtues of the
warrior in great perfection.
Moors. The ancient Moors, or Mauri, were the
inhabitants of the Roman province of Maure-
tania, roughly including the modern Algeria and
Morocco. They were probably of mixed descent,
partly Semitic from Arabia, partly Western
Hamitic from indigenous sources. In modern times
the name is applied ( i ) to the invaders and con-
querors of Spain in the Middle Ages, who were
mostly of Arab and Berber stock ; (2) to the
present inhabitants of Morocco and the Barbary
States, of the same stocks, with a large infusion of
Sudanese Negro blood. The Moors have always
been a turbulent and warlike people, who fur-
nished the most notorious pirates of modern
history, thanks to their commanding position on
the great highway of sea-borne commerce.
Moquis. See Pueblo Indians.
Mordvins. A branch of the Finns ((7.?'.), forming
small communities on the banks of the Volga.
Mosgus. See Lake Chad Group.
Mossis. See Nigerian Group.
Mpongwes. A Bantu Negro race on the Gaboon
Estuary in French Equatorial Africa, given to
drink and boasting, of little economic value,
though once powerful.
Mulattos. Half-breeds between whites and
negroes.
Mundas. A Kolarian race of Lower Bengal,
with possible traces of Negroid blood.
Mundrucus. See Tupi-Guarani.
Mundus. See Nilitic Group.
Mushi-Kongo. Bantu Negroes of Portuguese
W^est Africa, still in an absolutely savage state.
Muskhogean, or Appalachian. A group of
North American Indian tribes, formerly occupy-
ing the south-eastern corner of the present
United States, south of Tennessee, and east of
Arkansas. Formerly a powerful confederacy of
warlike hunters, they are now extinct or confined
to Indian reservations. The chief tribes are
Alibamus, Apalachis, Chickasaws, Choktaws,
Creeks or Muskhogees, and Seminoles.
Mycenieans. The inhabitants of ancient My-
cenae, one of the chief centres of prehistoric
culture in Greece before the Homeric age.
Recent excavations, at Mycenae itself, at Cnossos
in Crete, and other contemporary sites of
government, have thrown light on the remarkable
civilisation which then existed. The Mycenaeans,
Cretans, and their kindred peoples were prob-
ably a mixed Caucasic race, with affinities to the
later Aryan Achaeans and to the aboriginal
Hamitic Pelasgians ; but nothing is yet certainly
known of their ethnological place.
Nagars. See Dards.
Nagas. Aborigines of the Naga Hills, in South
Assam, semi-savage and formerly accustomed
to raid the British provinces ; now under British
rule. They are of Tibetan stock.
Nahuans, or Mexican Indians. The aboriginal
inhabitants of modern Mexico, whose history
dates back to the sixth century. The oldest of
the Nahuan races was that of the Toltecs, who
337
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
established a civilisation marked by architectural
and artistic monuments still existing, north of
the valley of Anahuac. They were followed by
the ruder Chichimecs and the Aztecs (q.v.). Other
branches of the same race are the Pipils and the
Niquirans of Nicaragua.
Naimans. (i) See Sharras. (2) A tribe of
the Middle Horde of the Kazaks. See Kirghiz.
Nairs. A Hindu tribe of Malabar, dis-
tinguished by their peculiar marriage customs.
They practise polyandry, and a Nair's property
descends not to his own but to his sister's
children.
Namas or Namaquas. A Hottentot tribe of
Namaqualand, the true aborigines and the
principal representatives of the Hottentots {q.v.).
Scattered in small pastoral groups.
Natchez Indians. An extinct North American
Indian race, formerly inhabiting the region of the
Lower Mississippi.
Navajos. See Athabascan.
Neanderthal Man. A race of primitive man,
represented only by a skull and a few bones
found in a limestone cave of the Neanderthal
in Rhenish Prussia in 1S56. The most ape-like
race yet known, and probably the oldest.
Negritoes. A branch of Ethiopic Man, found
in Central Africa, and in the Andamans, the
Malay Peninsula and the Philippines, akin to
negroes but of smaller stature and more ape-like.
Possibly the primitive stock- from which the
Negroes (q.v.) were developed.
Negroes. The most numerous branch of
Ethiopic Man, divided into African (Sudanese,
Bantu, and Hottentot-Bushman) and Oceanic
(Papuan, Melanesian, and Australian) sections.
American Negroes are descended from African
slaves, mostly of Sudanese origin. See Haytians.
Nempes. See Nigerian Group.
Nestorians. A Syrian race, belonging to the
Arania>an stock of the Semitic family, dis-
tinguished by a special form of Christian belief,
who were driven out of the Roman Empire in the
fifth century, and whose descendants now form a
special community in the mountain ranges of
Kurdistan. They are poor and illiterate. A
branch of Nestorians is found in Travancore,
where they go by the name of Syrian Christians.
New Guinea Natives, See Papuans.
New Zealanders. ( i ) Aborigines [sec Maoris].
( j) White inhabitants of New Zealand, of An^lo-
Sa.xon descent.
Nez Perces. A tribe of North American
Inilians, in British Columbia and Idaho, part of
whom are well advanced in civilisation.
Niam-Niam. See Azandeh.
Nicaraguans. White natives of Nicaragua,
in Central America, of Spanish descent, with
Indian and negro elements.
Nicobarese. Natives of the Nicobar Islands,
of Malay blood mixed with that of the Mon-
golic aborigines. Formerly given to piracy.
Nigerian Group. A group of Sudanese Negro
tribes, all of allied stocks, mhabiting the Niger
Delta, the Oil River, Lower Benue, and Niger
region, including the Niger Bend. Amongst them
are the people of Benin — noted for their vast
human sacritices — the Abo, Nempe, Nupe, Akasa,
Qua, Efik, Okrika, Akpa, Mossi, Sienereh, and
many other tribes.
Nilitic Group. Another group of Sudanese
Negro tribes, inhabiting the districts of the
White Nile, Sobat, and the northern slopes of th^
Nile-Congo divide. They include the Abaka,
Abukaya, Bongo, ShuU, Falanj, Madi, Bari, Nuer,
Shilluk, Dinka, Mundu, Rol, Mittu, Krej, and
Fertit tribes. They are mainly hard-working
agriculturists, from whom the British draw
material for excellent soldiery.
Niquirans. See Nahuans.
Nogais. A race of Caucasian Tartars (q.v.)
inhabiting the steppes of the Kuma River ;
nomadic cattle-breeders.
Normans. Natives of Normandy, descended
from the Norsemen (q.v.) who settled on the
French coast under Rolf the Ganger in the
beginning of the tenth century. The history of
the Normans, who conquered England and
Sicily, is well known. The modern Normans
still preserve many signs of their Scandinavian
ancestry, which distinguish them from their
French or Breton neighbours.
Norsemen or Northmen. A name given in the
Middle Ages to the piratical emigrants from
Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway, who
descended on the coasts of England, France,
Germany, and Southern Europe. They called
themselves Vikings. These sea-rovers came, in
the first instance, for portable plunder, but in
many cases they were tempted by the look of the
more fertile lands of the south to make settle-
ments, among which those of the Danes in
England and Ireland and of the Norwegians in
Normandy, England, and Sicily were the most
lasting and important.
Norwegians. A branch of the Scandinavian
stock of the Aryan family. They are probably
descended from Teutonic immigrants — perhaps
of Gothic race — who entered the Scandinavian
peninsula in prehistoric times, and drove out the
aboriginal Lapps or Finns. Another theory
makes Scandinavia the original home of the
Aryans, of whom, on this view, the Norwegians
would represent the primitive stock. Their his-
tory begins in the ninth century, when a Nor-
wegian kingdom was established by Harold
Fairhair. The old Norwegians were extremely
warlike and piratical [see Norsemen]. Their
modern descendants are a peaceful and in-
dustrious race, the most simple and democratic
people of Europe, who recently threw off the
Swedish rule and re-established the ancient
Norwegian kingdom.
Nsakkaras. See Welle Group.
Nuba Group. A group of Sudanese Negro
tribes, occupying Nubia, Dar-Fur, and Kordofan,
in the Egyptian Sudan. They include the Furs,
Nubas, Nile Nubians, Tumalis, Kargos, Kulfans,
Kolajis, and Kunjaras. They are an active and
warlike race, in which the primitive Negro blood
has frequently been modified by Semitic (Arab)
and Hamitic influences. They supply many of
our Sudanese regiments.
Nubians. Ancient inhabitants of Nubia,
probably identical with Ethiopians (q.v.), but
modified by the infusion of Negro blood. They
established a Nubian kingdom in the Upper Nile
basin about the sixth century.
Nuers. See Nilitic Group.
Numidians. An ancient Hamitic race, in-
habiting the district now known as Algeria.
They were fine horsemen, warlike, but
treacherous, and were conquered by Rome
B.C. 46. See Berbers.
Nupcs. See Nigerian Group.
AN ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
Nutkas. A collective name given to the
Indian tribes of Vancouver Island and the
adjoining districts of British Columbia.
Obongos. A Bushman-like race of pygmy
Negritoes discovered by Du Chaillu on the
western coast of equatorial Africa, physically and
mentally degenerate.
Ojibbeways. See Algonquian.
Okrikas. See Nigerian Group.
Olkhonese. A tribe of Buriats (^.y.) inhabit-
ing the district of Lake Baikal.
Omaguas. See Tupi-Guarani.
Omahas. See Siouan.
Onondagas. See Iroquoian.
Opata-Pima. A group of Central American
Indian races, allied to the Nahuan group {q-v.),
but of lower mental and physical type. It
includes the Cora, Yuma, Papago, Tarahumara
and Tepeguana tribes.
Orang-Benua, Orang-Lauts. See Malays.
Ordos. See Sharras.
Orochs. A nomadic tribe of the Siberian
Tunguses (q.v.).
Osages. See Siouan.
Oscans. A primitive Italic race inhabiting
Campania, who were conquered by and amalga-
mated with the Samnites (q.v.) in the fifth
century, B.C. Their language was a ruder form
of Latin.
Osmanlis. See Turks.
Ossets. An isolated Aryan race inhabiting
the Central Caucasus, and differing in language
and customs from their Caucasian neighbours.
They are probably allied to the Iranian stock,
though some suppose them to be descended
from Gothic settlers.
Ostrogoths. See Goths.
Ostyaks. A Ugrian race of Mongolic physical
type, a"ied to the Samoyedes [q.v.), inhabiting
the Obi basin in Western Siberia. They are mainly
nomads, hunters and reindeer breeders. They
are kind, gentle and honest, and show consider-
able artistic power.
Otoes. See Siouan.
Otomis. An Indian race of Mexico, assumed on
linguistic grounds to represent the oldest of
American Indian stocks.
Ottomans. See Turks.
Ovaherero. See Hereros.
Ovampos. The chief Bantu Negro race of
German South-west Africa, tall and well-
proportioned, with regular features — a fine
Negro type. They are industrious agricul-
turists, given to raiding and inter-tribal warfare.
Oworos, Oyos. See Yorubas.
Pampas Indians. See Puelches.
Pangasinans. A semi -civilised Malayan race
in the Philippine Islands.
Papagos. See Opata-pima.
Papuans. The savage aborigines of New
Guinea and the neighbouring islands of the
Torres Strait and East Malaysia. They belong
to the Oceanic division of Ethiopic Man, and
are allied to the African Negro, though they stand
at a somewhat higher intellectual level. They
are of Negroid physical type, characterised
specially by their mops of frizzy hair ; colour,
a sooty brown to black, with projecting jaws,
thick lips and retreating foreheads ; nose some-
times flat, but oftener hooked and of Jewish
appearance. The race has probably been
modified by Malayan and Polynesian inter-
mixture. Probably the Melanesians and the
Australian aborigines are closely related to the
Papuans. They are a fierce and treacherous
race, hostile to strangers, and given to canni-
balism and head-hunting. They show much
agricultural skill, and in some cases are suscept-
ible of European civilisation.
Paraguay Indians. See Tupi-Guarani.
Parsees. Followers of Zoroaster, of Persian
descent, who have settled in India, chiefly near
Bombay, where they have become one of the
most thriving sections of the community, owing
to their marked ability for commerce. A
small remnant of Parsees, known as Guebres,
is still to be found in Persia itself.
Partkians. A warlike people of the ancient
world, inhabiting a district of Northern Persia.
They seem to have been of Scythian (q.v.)
descent, and were noted for their habit of fight-
ing on horseback and discharging their most
fatal arrows whilst in pretended flight. Under
Mithridates (171-138 b.c), the Parthians became
supreme in Persia, and afterwards warred for long
successfully with the Romans.
Patagonians or Tehuelches. Natives of the
most southerly region of the American continent,
noted for their great stature, in many cases
approaching the gigantic. They are one of the
physically strongest races of the earth, of a
yellowish brown colour, with well-formed and
regular features. They are nomadic tribes of
Araucanian (q.v.) descent, who live by fishing and
hunting ; and peacefully disposed to strangers.
Pathans. See Afghans.
Payaguas. A South American Indian race,
in the Argentine, whose wealth of silver orna-
ments gave a name to the Rio de la Plata.
Pawnees. A brave warlike trib? of North
American Indians, akin to the Shoshonean
group (q.v.) and formerly settled in Nebraska.
Pechenegs. An ancient Mongolic race of
Turki stock, a branch of the Kipchaks (q.v.).
Pelasgians. The pre-Aryan inhabitants of
Greece, apparently the aborigines of that
country, who were dispossessed by the Aryan
Hellenes. Little or nothing is known of their
racial characteristics and affinities ; but the
excavations recently made at Mycena?, Knossos,
etc., show that they had reached a high stage of
civilisation in prehistoric times on the ^gean
coast. Probably a branch of the Western
Hamitic family, resembling Berbers (q.v.) in
physical type. See Mycen.^ans and Etruscans.
Permians. A branch of the Finnish race,
inhabiting the district of Perm in Russia, and
closely resembling the Karelians (q.v.).
Persians. The ancient Persians were the
main branch of the Iranian stock of the Aryan
family, a civilised and warlike nation, who
taught their sons " to ride, to shoot with the bow,
and to speak the truth." They reared a great
empire under Cyrus (b.c. 537) and his successors,
which was destroyed by Alexander the Great
and divided in 324 B.C. The modern Persians,
known as Tajiks, and as Tats on the west of the
Caspian, are the descendants of the ancient
Persians with a considerable admixture of
alien blood, due to a long period of Arab and
Turkish domination. They present a fine Aryan
type, however, and are cultivated and com-
mercial, though not warlike.
Peruvian Indians. See Incas.
Peruvians. White natives of Peru, partly of pure
Spanish descent, partly crossed with Indian blood.
339
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Philippine Islander^. The natives of the
Philippines belong to three distinct races —
Negritoes, Indonesians and Malays. The
Negritoes are knowTi as Aetas (q.v.). The Indone-
sians are confined to the island of Mindanao ;
they are light-skinned, tall and well-developed
physically. Their chief tribe is that of the
Igorrotes. The Malays are brown-skinned,
with black hair and flat noses, being crossed
with Negrito blood. Their chief tribes are the
Visayans, Tagalogs, Bicols, Ilocanos, Cayagans,
Pangasinans and Pampangas. These are all
Christianised and fairly civilised. The interior
is occupied by wild and savage tribes of similar
race, and by the dwarfish and nomadic Negritoes.
Many of these tribes practise head-hunting,
cannibalism, and human sacrifices. The more
civilised tribes, with the Spanish-Indian half-
breeds, known as Filipinos, are turbulent and
lawless, the source of much trouble to the new
American as to the old Spanish rulers.
Philistines. An ancient race inhabiting the
Mediterranean seaboard to the south-west of
Juda>a, who warred much with the Israelites,
and were finally subdued by them. They were
probably a Canaanitish people, belonging to the
Semitic family ; but some regard them as an
immigrant Hamitic race, perhaps related to the
Cretans or Pelasgians. The assumed inferiority
of their culture to that of the Israelites has given
rise to the modern use of " Philistine " as a term
of reproach.
Phoenicians. The greatest ' seafaring and
trading nation of aucicnt times, and the earliest
of Mediterranean sea-powers. A branch of the
Canaanite stock of the Semitic family, they
inhabited the Mediterranean coast between
Latakia and Acre, their chief cities being Tyre
and Sidon. They possessed a remarkable
polytheistic religion, disfigured by human sacri-
fices. They were an inventive race, to whom we
owe glass and Tyrian purple. They seem to have
entered PhcEnicia from the direction of the Red
Sea in prehistoric times, and were at first subject
to Egypt, but about 13CX) B.C. reared a great
maritime empire, which endured for nearly a
thousand years and was destroyed by Alexander
the Great. Thcj^ were the great traders of the
ancient world, and carried on a commerce which
ranged from Cornwall to Ceylon and Senegal. The
Carthaginians (q.v.) were a colony of Phoenicians.
Phrygians. An ancient pastoral people of
Asia Mmor, closely related to the Armenians
(q.v.), who were absorbed by the Persians in the
sixth century B.C.
Picts. The aborigines of ancient Scotland, a
short, round-headed, dark race, probably a
branch of the Iberian stock of the Western
Hamitic family, and thus closely related to the
Basques (q.v.)- The Picts were a wild and warlike
race, who harassed the Roman province of
Britain, and were exterminated by the invading
Scots from Ireland in the early part of the
Christian era. The whole Pictish problem is
still unsolved by ethnologists, some of whom
hold that the Picts were a Celtic race, allied to
the modern Welsh or to the Scottish Highlanders
of to-day.
Picuris. See Pueblo Indians.
Pipits. See Nahuans.
Pitcairn Islanders. Half-breed descendants of
Englishmen (the mutineers of the " Bounty ")
and Tahitian women. A peaceful and idyllic race.
Pocomans, Poconches. See Maya-Quiche.
Poles. A stock of the Western Slavonic
family, originally dwelling between the Vistula
and the Oder. In the tenth century Poland
became an independent European Power, and
remained an elective kingdom down to its
partition in the eighteenth century between
Russia, Austria and Prussia. The Polish
peasantry have always been industrious and
successful agriculturists, whilst the nobility were
turbulent and warlike. The Poles who live under
Austrian and German rule are fairly contented,
but those of Russian Poland have carried on a
long and often bloody series of struggles for
liberty. Of late years, Russian Poland has
become a manufacturing country, under German
influence. The Poles have a considerable litera-
ture, and are eminently musical.
Polynesians. The chief stock of the Indo-
nesian (q.v) family, the tall, brown-skinned race
of Caucasic type who inhabit the chief islands
of the Eastern Pacific, and are generally known
as South Sea Islanders. Their chief races
are the Maoris (q.v.) of New Zealand, the
Marquesans, Tahitians, Tongans and Samoans,
besides the natives of Easter, Gambler, Hervey,
and other smaller islands. They are of tall
stature — onl}' surpassed by the Patagonians —
muscular frame, regular and often handsome
features, with brown skins, square jaws, and
broad skulls. They probably originated in
Malaysia, where they are still represented by the
Battaks of North Sumatra, some Dyak races,
and certain tribes of the Philippines and Gilolo.
They are a gay, pleasure-loving people, formerly
addicted to cannibalism, but otherwise of pleasing
manners, and are now rapidly acquiring civilisa-
tion, though their numbers are everywhere
decreasing under the influence of European
manners and diseases.
Poncas. See Siouan.
Portuguese. Natives of Portugal, a mixed
race, probably of Iberian or Basque origin, with
later Celtic elements. After falling successively
under Roman, Visigothic, and Saracen domitiion,
they formed an independent kingdom in the
twelfth century. The early Portuguese were
enterprising seamen, who contributed largely to
the exploration of the world, and founded many
colonies in Africa, which they still possess.
Brazil is their chief American settlement, now
independent.
Provencals. Natives of Provence, in the
South of France. Their primitive Ligurian (q.v.)
stock was modified by man^^ successive influences,
such as the Greek colonists, who founded Mar-
seilles, the Roman settlers in the Provincia
(Provence), and, later, Gothic and Saracen
invaders. The Provencals are a gay, impulsive
and pleasure-loving people, markedly distinct
from the more staid and industrious inhabitants
of Northern France.
Pruczi, or Old Prussians. See Lettic.
Prussians. The earliest inhabitants of Prussia
were Slavonic tribes [see Lettic]. The modern
Prussians, the dominant race of the German
Empire, belong to the High German branch of
the Teutonic stock.
Pueblo Indians. A semi-civilised race of
North American Indians, dwelling in New
Mexico and Arizona. They inhabit " pueblos,"
or huge houses, often large enough to contain a
whole tribe under one roof. They possess
WOMEN OF THE NUPE TRIBE IN NIGERIA
The Nupe tribe is a family belonging to the Nigerian group of Sudanese Negroes. They inhabit chiefly the town
of Lokoja, in West Africa. [See under Nigerian group].
THE AINUS, PROBABLY THE ORIGINAL INHABITANTS OF JAPAN
The Ainus are a declining race, now confined to a small area in the Far East. They have, as is seen in this picture,
handsome features and an abundance of hair. [See page 312].
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
interesting religious and social customs, much
studied by anthropologists. Their chief tribes are
theZunis.Teguas, Taos, Picuris, and Tusayas. The
Moquis of Arizona are closely related to them.
Puelches. or Pampas Indians. A strongly-
built, dark-skinned race of South American
Indians, who inhabit the great plains or pampas
from the Saladillo to the Rio Negro in Argentina.
They are expert horsemen, from whom the
Gauchos iq.v.) are derived.
Punjabis. Natives of the Punjab, in North-
West India, mostly Jats and Sikhs (^.w.) belonging
to the Hindu stock of the Aryan family. An
agricultural and warlike people.
Puntis. See Chinese.
Pygmies. Dwarfish Negrito races of Central
.Africa, long considered to be mythical, but now
well known to ethnologists. They include the
Akkas and W'ochuas of the Welle Basin, the
Obongos of the Gaboon, the Batwas of South
Congo, etc. In very early times they were
known by repute to the Egyptians — on whose
monuments they appear in the thirty-fourth
century B.C. — and the Greeks. They live by the
chase in the Central African forests, and use
poisoned arrows. Other small races, .such as the
Bushmen, Lapps, Kalangs, Samangs, etc., have
contributed to the fame of the Pygmies.
Quas. A Sudanese Negro tribe on the Ivory
Coast, belonging to the Nigerian group {q.v.).
Quapaws. Sec Siouan.
Queahs. See Liberian Group.
Quiches. A race of Central American Indians
in Guatemala, rivalling the Aztecs in the
possession of an ancient civilisation and a curious
mvthology. See Maya-Quiche.
Quichuas. See Incas.
Rajputs. The predominant race of Raj-
putana, in Central India, belonging to the Hindu
stock of the Aryan family. They are a proud and
warlike aristocracy of soldiers and landowners,
who rule many native states, of which Jaipur,
Jodhpur and Udaipur are the most important.
Ramas. See Lencan.
Redskins. A term given in common parlance
to North American Indians, from their colour.
Rejangs. A Malayan race of Sumatra, akin
to the .Acliinese iq.v.).
Rols. See Nilitic Group.
Romans. The most powerful and warlike, and
in every sense the greatest race of ancient
luirope, who acquired the dominion of the
Western world, and laid the foundations of
modern civilisation. The city of Rome was
founded by Alban shepherds, of Latin (q.v.) race,
in the eighth century B.C. Oscan, Sabine,
Samnite, and Umbrian iq.v.) elements were
added to the original stock, and thus the great
Roman character was moulded. Rome later
extended her power over the whole of Italy, and
then over the whole of the known world.
Romance Races. See Latin Races.
Romansch. Natives of the Grisons in Switzer-
land, speaking a Romance dialect, and probably
of Italic race.
Roumanians, or Vlachs. Natives of the
modern Roumanian kingdom, the leading
Balkan State, composed of the older principali-
ties of Wallachia and Moldavia, which were long
subject to the Turks. The Vlachs (Wallachs, a
name akin to our Welsh) are probably descended
from the Latin-speaking inhabitants of the
ancitiit Roman province of Dacia, a tribe of
Thracian descent, which was subjugated by
Trajan in the second century. They have
preserved their language, but their blood has
been mingled with that of numerous conquerors —
Goths, Huns, Slovenians, Albanians, Turks, etc.
The Roumanian peasantry are a hardy and
thrifty race, retaining their old warlike traditions.
Rucuyennes. See Caries.
Russians. The chief of the Slavonic races
inhabiting European Russia, and divided into
Great, White, and Little Russians. The physical
distinction between these races is attributed to
the mixture of the primitive Russian stock
respectively with Finnish, Lithuanian, and
Turkish blood. The original Russians belonged
to the Slavonic stock of the Aryan family, and
seem to have been settled in prehistoric times
between the Danube, the Elbe, and the south
coast of the Baltic. Thus they must have
entered Russia from the west in the early
centuries of our era. There they conquered and
drove out or assimilated the aborigines of
Northern Mongolic (Finno-Turkish) stock, and
established a number of small states, agricultural
in character, which long suffered from Tartar
invasion, notably that of the Golden Horde
[see Kipchaks], and were gradually moulded
into a single kingdom, with Moscow for its
capital. Modern Russia, with its vast Asiatic
dependencies, is one of the greatest Empires in
the world, but it is in a state of transition, and
its civilisation is consequently backward. The
Russian peasants are very patient, industrious,
and thrifty. When well led, they are admirable
soldiers. Their chief occupation is agriculture.
Ruthenians. A branch of the Little Russian
race, who inhabit the district of the Carpathians
in Galicia and Hungary ; poor, but hardy
cultivators of the soil.
Sabaeans. See Himyarites.
Sabines. An ancient Italic race, who in-
habited the district between the Central Apen-
nines— their ancestral home — and Rome. The
Samnites were their descendants or near kins-
men, and the Umbrians were less closely related
to them. When Rome was founded there was
a strong Sabine element in its population, as
indicated by the story of the Rape of the Sabine
Women, and the statement that several of the
early kings of Rome were of Sabine blood. The
Sabines and Samnites warred against Rome
for many years, but both were ultimately sub-
dued and incorporated in the Roman State.
Sac Indians. See Algonquian.
Sakais, or Samangs. An aboriginal Negrito
race of the Malay Peninsula ; a wild and un-
civilised people, with black skins and woolly
hair, often approaching the ape-like in physical
development and intelligence.
Sakalavas. One of the principal groups of
the Malagasy tribes, inhabiting the west coast
of Madagascar ; of mixed Malay and negro
blood, and akin to the Hovas (q.v.).
Salish. See Flatheads.
Samangs. See Sakais.
Sambos, or Zambos. Half-breeds sprung from
Negro and Indian parents.
Samnites. Sec Sauines.
Samoans. A Polynesian (q.v.) race, of fine
physical development, lazy and pleasure-loving,
inhabiting the Samoan group of islands.
Samoyedes. A Finno-Ugrian race, inhabiting
the Obi basin in Siberia, once widely spread over
AN ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
the extreme north of Europe and Asia. They
are short and dark haired, with Monf;oUc features,
brave and honest, hve by hunting and hshing,
and are still in the Stone Age.
Samsams. A mixed Malayo-Siamese race,
forming a large part of the population of the
Malayan States of Kedah and Ligor.
Santals. A negro-like aboriginal tribe of
Orissa in India, agiculturists, of the Kolarian
family (q.v.).
Saracens. A term applied in the Middle Ages
to the Moslem enemies of Christendom, especially
to the nomadic Arabs and Bedouins of the
Syrian deserts.
Saras. See Lake Chad Group.
Sarakoles. See Mandingan.
Sards, or Sardinians. The aboriginal inhabi-
tants of Sardinia, probably of the Western
Hamitic family, akin to the Iberians or
Ligurians (q.v.). The modern Sartlinians are
descended from this race, with considerable
admixtures of alien blood from the Carthaginian,
Roman; Saracen, Spanish and Italian owners
of the island in successive periods.
Sarmatians. An ancient nomadic and war-
like people, probably akin to the Scythians
(q.v.), who roamed over the wide plains of
Eastern Europe. Fine horsemen. They were
destroyed by the Goths in the fourth century,
and disappeared from history.
Sassaks. Natives of Lombok in the Sunda
Islands, of Malayan race.
Savoyards. Natives of Savoy, originally a
short, round-skulled, dark race, akin to the
Auvergnats (q.v.), now largely mingled with
Teutonic blood.
Saxons. ( i ) The Old Saxons originally in-
habited the estuary of the Elbe and the neigh-
bouring islands. They were a warlike race, of
Low German stock, whose name is said to be
derived from the " Saxes," or heavy knives
which they used in war. They were one of the
most adventurous of Teutonic races, and made
many piratical and colonising excursions, of
which the most important was their settlement
in Britain in the fifth century, where they united
with the Angles (q.v.) to lay the foundation of
the modern English people. (2) The Saxons who
remained on the Continent gradually extended
their dominion till it reached modern Saxony.
Under Charlemagne the Saxon power was sub-
ordinated to that of the Franks. Saxony later
became an independent duchy, which is still
one of the chief States of the German
Empire. The modern Saxons are less adventurous
than their ancestors, very industrious, and
successful in agriculture and industry, and make
excellent soldiers.
Scandinavians. A main stock of the Aryan
family, sometimes classed as a branch of the
Teutonic stock, including the Icelanders, Norwe-
gians, Danes and Swedes, as well as the old
Norsemen and Normans (q.v.). Some ethnolo-
gists regard them as the original stock of the
Aryan family. They are tall, blue-eyed, fair-
haired, warlike, and good sailors and colonists.
Scots or Scotch. ( i ) The ancient Scots were
a Celtic race, belonging to the Goidelic or
Q Celts (q.v.), originally settled in Ireland — the
ancient Scotia — whence they made settlem nts
in the fifth century in modern Scotland, to which
they gave their name. They were gradually
driven back into the Highlands by Anglo-
Saxon, Norman and Danish invaders, and are
now represented by the Highlanders (q.v.) or
Gaels. (2) The modern Scots, or Lowland
Scots, are mainly of Anglo-Saxon race, modified
by Norman, Danish, and Flemish elements.
They are one of the finest and most hardy and
industrious races in the world, equally successful
in the arts of war and peace.
Scythians. An ancient nomadic and warlike
race; found in the seventh century B.C. on the
vast plains of South-eastern Europe, where they
lived by cattle-breeding and raiding. They
dwelt in tent-covered waggons, fought on horse-
back with bows and arrows, and made drinking-
cups of their enemies' skulls. Their origin is in
dispute. Some regard them as a Mongolic race,
which was modified by association with Aryan
races, and others as an Aryan stock ; their
kinsmen, the Sarmatians (q.v.), were almost
certainly Aryans. They made several incursions
into Asia, where they conquex'ed a large tract
of Northern India and established a kingdom
which lasted till about the fourth century a.d.
The Rajputs and Jats (q.v.) are sometimes held
to be their descendants.
Selengese. See Buriats.
Seljuks. A warlike Turkish people who were
settled on the Jaxartes in the eleventh century
and afterwards founded a considerable empire
in Western Asia. See Turks.
Seminoles. See Muskhogean.
Semites. An important family of Caucasic
Man, who probably originated in North Africa,
from a similar stock to that of the Hamites.
They are characterised by fine regular features,
large aquiline noses, black eyes and hair, white
skins, long skulls and square jaws. They are
very intellectual, though less practical than the
Aryan type ; poets, prophets, and dreamers,
rather than men of action. They have given the
world its two greatest religions — Christianity
and Islam. Their chief divisions are Assyrians,
Aramaeans, Canaanites, Arabs and Himyarites
(q.v.). In the modern world they are best known
from the ubiquitous Jews (q.v.).
Seneca Indians. See Iroquoian.
Serbs. See Servians.
Serers. Sudanese Negroes inhabiting Sene-
gambia in the Cape Verde district. They are
the tallest of Negro races, with herculean frames,
and are akin to the Wolofs (q.v.)
Servians, or Serbs. A race of Southern Sla-
vonic stock, now inhabiting Scrvia. They were at
first identical with the Croats (q.v.), and seem to
have originated in the Carpathian district,
whence they migrated into the Balkan peninsula
in the seventh century. The Serbs then separated
from the Croats, and in the twelfth century
founded a powerful Servian kingdom, which was
conquered by the Turks in the fifteenth. The
Servians recovered their independence in 1830,
under Milosh Obrcnovitch. The Servians are a
well-built race, proud and martial in tempera-
ment, quick-tempered and prone to deeds of
violence, as their recent revolution witnessed.
Shangallas. A mixed negroid race of the
Abyssinian slopes. Sudanese Negroes with a
Hamitic infusion.
Shans. Natives of the independent Shan
States, lying to the north of Siam. They are
identical with the Laos, and closely related to the
Siamese (q.v.). They belong to the Irwfo-Chinese
stock of the Southern Mongolic family, and are
343
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
probably descended from an aboriginal race of
China, which appeared on the Upper Lawadi
about 2,000 years ago. They are a peaceful,
pieasure-loving people, mainly agricultural, but
not un warlike. They have a sallow skin and
Mongoloid features.
Shftrras, or Eastern Mongols. A branch of the
Mongol stock of the Northern Mongolic family.
They are a nomad, tent-dwelling, pastoral race,
who roam over the great steppes of Central
Asia. They include the Khalkas, north of the
Gobi Desert, the Tanguts of Northern Tibet, the
Chakars, Barins, Durbans, Uruts, Naimans,
and Ordos south of the Gobi. They are descended
from thr- older Mongols {q.v.), whom they re-
semble in physical type.
SKftwnees. See Algonquian.
Skilluks. See Nilitic Group.
Shoskonean. A group of North American
Indian tril)es, all belonging to the Shoshone or
Snake family, formerly occupying Idaho, Utah,
and Wyoming, with neighbouring districts. They
include the Shoshones or Snakes, Bannocks,
Comanches, Utahs, and Mokis. With the excep-
tion of the warlike Comanches, they are a peace-
ful race, who have received the white invaders
with friendship.
Shulis. See Nilitic Group.
Siamese. Natives of Siam, belonging to the
Indo-Chinese stock of the Southern Mongolic
family. They are closely related to the Shans
{q.v.). They are of medium height, olive com-
plexion, with slightly flattened noses, promi ent
lips, and black hair. They are a peaceful and
indolent race, who have recently shown promise
of assimilating Western civilisation. Their blood
is largely mixed with Chinese and Malay. Siam
is still independent, forming a buffer state
between British and French possessions.
Siberian. A stock of the Northern Mongolic
family, including the Chukchi, Koryak, Kamcha-
dale, Gilyak, and Yukaghir tribes (q.v.).
Sicani, Siculi. See Sicilians.
Sicilians. The primitive inhabitants of Sicily
were the Sicani, probably a Hamitic race allied
to the Ligurians (q.v. ). They were followed by the
Siculi, an Aryan race of Italic stock, who crossed
from Italy about 1000 b.c. They were civilised
and modified by Phoenician, and especially Greek
settlers, with later Norman and Saracen influ-
ences. Of all these elements the modem
Sicilians are compounded. They are a hand-
some, industrious, and amiable race, but turbu-
lent, lawless, given to blood-feuds and brigandage.
Sienereks. See Nigerian Group.
Sikhs. A powerful and warlike race of
Northern India, united by a common religious
faith, dating from the eighteenth century, and
mainly of Jat (q.v.) descent. Under Kanjit Singh,
at the beginning of the eighteenth century', they
reared a formidable military power in the Punjab,
which was conquered by the British in 1846-1849.
The Sikhs contribute many of the best and
most trustworthy troops to the Indian Army.
Silurians. A dark, round-skulled, short race
who inhabited South Wales and the neighbouring
districts of England in Roman times. They
were probably of Iberian stock, related to the
ancient Picts and modem Basques.
Sindis. Natives of Sind in North-West India,
of Hindu descent.
Singphos. A wild, daring hill-tribe of Tibetan
stock bordering on the Assam valley, formerly
344
given to raiding, but now peaceful agriculturists.
The Chins of the Arakan uplands are probably
an identical race ; they are still predatory.
Sinhalese. See Dra vidians.
Siouan. A numerous and formerly powerful
group of North American Indians, inhabiting the
western prairies between the Mississippi and the
Rocky Mountains. Their chief tribe was the
Sioux or Dakotas, warriors of fine physique,
courage, and military skill, who long maintained
a successful resistance against the white settlers.
Other allied tribes were the Assinaboins, Omahas,
Poncas, Kaws, Osages, Quapaws, lowas, Otoes,
Missouris, Winnebagos, Mandans, Minnetarees,
Absarakas or Crows, Tutelos, and Catawbas.
Sioux, or Dakotas. See Siouan.
Siryanians. A tribe of Ugrian Finns, dwelling
on both sides of the Northern Urals, resembling
the Samoyedes (q.v. ), except in their white colour
and fair hair, probably due to a mixture of
Slavonic blood. See Finno-Ugrian.
Slavonic Races, Slavs or Slavonians. A main
stock of the Aryan family, occupying the greater
part of Eastern Europe, and formerly extending
as far west as the Elbe. Many ethnologists con-
sider them to be the primitive Aryan stock.
They are a peaceful and industrious agricultural
and pastoral race, broad-skulled, with fair hair
and blue eyes ; though the primitive type has
been much modified by intermixture of blood,
especially with Mongolic races, who have im-
printed a Tartar character on many Slavonic
physiognomies. The Slavs are divided into
Eastern (Russians and Ruthenians), Western
(Czechs and Slovaks, Poles and Wends or Sorbs),
and Southern (Bulgarians, Servians, and Croats,
Dalmatians, Slovenians, and Montenegrins). See
under these heads.
Slovaks. See Czechs.
Slovenians. A branch of Southern Slavonic
stock, inhabiting Styria, Carinthia, and adjoining
districts. '
Solimas. See Temne Group.
Somalis. An Eastern Hamitic race of Somali-
land in North-East Africa. They are a pastoral
people, of good physique, handsome features,
and light-brown colour, warlike and independent.
The original Hamitic stock— closely akin to that
of the Gallas (q.v.) — is modified by Semitic and
Negro blood. They make excellent soldiers and
servants.
Sonrhays. A Negro race of the Middle Niger,
in whom the Sudanese stock is modified by Arab
and Berber elements.
Sorbs. See Wends.
Soyots. A tribe of Ugrian Finns, mixed with
Tartar blood, in the Sayan Mountains of South
Siberia. See Finno-Ugrian.
Spaniards, or Spanish. The earliest known
race of Spain was the Hamitic Iberians (q.v.), now
represented by the Basques. They were modified
by Celtic invasions, which gave birth to the
Celt-Iberian races of Central and Western Spain,
who struggled so long against the Roman arms,
by which they were finally subjugated and further
modified. In the fifth century the Vandals and
Visigoths (q.v.) invaded Spain, and founded a
Gothic monarchy, which fell before the Saracens
in 711. The Visigothic refugees in the northern
mountains gradually recovered the country, and
the kingdoms of Leon, Navarre, Castile, and
Aragon were ultimately united into a single
state. The modern Spaniards are thus of mixed
AN ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
race, in which the Iberian and Visigothic are the
predominant elements. They are haughty, brave,
and warUke, by which qualities they once owned
the greatest power in Europe. But they are
turbulent and lacking in political skill, so that
Spain has decayed. There are now signs of a
return to prosperity.
Spanish Americans. White natives of Central
and South American States, except Brazil.
Spartans. Natives of Sparta, the greatest
state of ancient Greece after Athens, of Dorian
stock, eminently warlike and patriotic, but
wanting in art or literature.
Sudanese. Full-blooded Negroes inhabiting the
Western, Central, and Eastern or Egyptian
Sudan — i.e., most of Africa north of the Victoria
Nyanza They are black in colour, with woolly
hair, projecting jaws, long skulls, broad, flat
feet and projecting heels, and form one of the
main divisions of Ethiopic Man. They are less
intelligent and susceptible of civilisation than
the Bantus [q.v.), in whom the Negro blood is
modified by Hamitic or Semitic admixtures.
They are mostly of strong physique, warlike and
predatory, fond of music and bright colours, with
the most elementary notions of art and religion.
They may be divided for convenience into several
racial groups [q.v.), such as Wolof, Felup, Tou-
couleur, Mandingan, Temne, Nigerian, Nilotic,
Liberian, Lake Chad, Wadai, Welle, Nuba, and
Nilotic, besides the Tshi, Ga, Ewe, and Yoruba
peoples of the Guinea district.
Suevi. See Swabians.
Sundanese. Natives of the Sunda Islands, of
Malayan stock, closely allied to Javanese (q.v.).
Susus. See Mandingan. ,
Sutughils. See Maya-Quiche.
Swabians. Natives of Swabia, an ancient
duchy occupying the south-western part of the
modem German Empire ; descended from the
ancient Suevi, with whom the Alemanni (q.v.)
were amalgamated. A strong, large-boned, and
good-humoured race of High German stock. The
Alsatians are closely allied to them.
Swahilis. Natives of Zanzibar and the adjoin-
ing mainland, Bantu Negroes, with a strong
infusion of Arab blood, which has made them
superior in intelligence and enterprise to the
average negro. They play a large part in the
commerce of East Africa, and their language—
Ki-Swahili — is the principal medium of com-
munication throughout the part of Africa between
the Equator and the Zambesi.
Swazis. Natives of Swaziland, a native state
on the south-east of the Transvaal. A cross
between Zulus and other Kafirs, they are indus-
trious and warlike.
Swedes. Natives of Sweden, a branch of the
Scandinavian stock. They seem to have been
originally a Teutonic race, who entered Northern
Sweden about 3,000 years ago, and drove out
the aboriginal Lapps and Finns. The inhabitants
of Southern Sweden were called Goths, and may
have been the ancestors of the Teutonic Goths.
In time they amalgamated with the Swedes,
and formed one nation, which has been an inde-
pendent kingdom through most of the Christian
era. The Swedes are warlike, and successful in
commerce and industry ; they make good sailors,
and possess a considerable literature.
Swiss, or Switzers. The prehistoric inhabitants
of Switzerland were the unknown builders of
the lake dwellings. At the dawn of history, in
Cajsar's time, the country was largely occupied
by a Celtic race, the Helvctii. Later, Switzerland
was invaded by Teutonic races of High German
stock, Alemanni, Burgundians, etc. The modem
Swiss are mostly descended from these races ;
there is also a considerable mixture of French,
Italic and Romansch elements. The Swiss have
always been a warlike race, who preserved the
independence of their mountainous country
through all ages, and in earlier times fumished
excellent mercenary soldiers to foreign armies.
They are now very industrious and successful in
many arts and crafts, such as watchmaking,
wood-carving, hotel-keeping, etc. They are a
simple and handsome race, possessing in full
measures the virtues of the mountaineer.
Syrians. The ancient Syrians were a branch
of the Aramaean stock of the Semitic family,
and the modem Syrians are their descendants,
with some Arab and Turkish elements added.
They are tall, with white skins and dark com-
plexions, black eyes and hair, often very hand-
some, and approaching the Jewish type. They
are not warlike, but succeed in commerce.
Tacullis. See Athabascan.
Tahitians. Natives of Tahiti, of Polynesiaii
stock ; pleasure-loving and po'ite, but immoral
and untrustworthy ; now civilised but formerly
noted for their cruelty.
Taipings. The Chinese rebels who attacked
the dynasty from 1850 to 1864.
Tajiks. See Persians.
Talaings. An Indo-Chinese race who preceded
the Burmese in the Irawadi Delta, and founded
a state of which Pegu was the capital. They were
subjugated by Burmese in the eighteenth century.
Talamancas. Wild hunting Indians, perfectly
uncivilised, who occupy the forest-covered
Atlantic slopes of Costa Rica.
Tamils. Natives of Northem Ceylon and
the Indian Carnatic. See Dr.widas.
Taos. See Pueblo Indians.
Tangots. Nomadic Mongols of Northern
Tibet. See Sharras.
Tarahumaras. See Opata-Pima.
Tarascans. A group of Indian tribes in-
habiting the province of Michoaca m Mexico.
Tartars or Tatars. The modern Tartars are
inhabitants of the Russian Empire, belonging to
the Turki stock of the Northern Mongolic family.
They are divided into various geographical
subdivisions, such as the Kazan, Astrakhan,
Crimean (or Krim) Caucasian and Siberian
Tartars. The name has no definite ethnical
significance. The Tatars— a Manchu word
meaning " archers " or " nomads "—were Mongol
tribes who were first so named in the ninth
century. They formed a large part of the hordes
of Genghiz Khan [see Mongols] and stood in
the van of the mediaeval Mongol incursions into
Europe, whence they attracted an attention out
of proportion to their importance. Europeans
called them Tartars, confusing the name Tartar
with the Greek Tartarus or Hell. See Turki.
Tasmanians. The extinct aborigines of Tas-
mania, akin to the Australians (q.v.), but of a
still lower Oceanic Negro type. They held a
place at the very bottom of humanity, alike in
physique, intelligence and culture, being still in
the early Stone Age ; savage, untamable, and
degraded.
Tatars. See Tartars.
345
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Tats. See Persians.
T&vastians. A branch of the Baltic Finns,
with thick-set figures, small blue eyes, light hair,
and white skins, probably the consequence of an
admixture of German blood with the original Fin-
nish stock. They inhabit central Finland.
Tazis. See Tunguses.
Teguas. See Pueblo Indians.
Tehuelches. Another name for the gigantic
PataL;onians (q.v.) of South America.
Telugus. See Dravidians.
Tembus, Amatembu, or Tambukies. A group
of Kafir (q.v.) tribes in Tembuland, to the north
of the Kei River in Cape Colony. Formerly
warlike and troublesome, now settled to agri-
culture and subjected to British rule.
Temnc Group. A group of Sudanese Negro
tribes, inhabiting the Sierra Leone district of
West Africa, including the Temnes or Timnis,
Kissis, Sherbros, Gallinas, Bulloms, Solimas,
Limbas, and Mendis.
Tepeguanas. See Opata-Pima.
Teutons. An important stock of the Aryan
family, inhabiting England and the Scottish
Lowlands, with the United States and British
Empire, Germany, Holland, and parts of Austria
and Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
The Teutonic races are divided into Low German
and High German divisions, to which some add,
but others do not, Scandinavians.
Thiinkits. A race of North American Indians
inhabiting the Pacific coast from Mount St. Elias
to the Simpson River, and the adjacent islands.
They live chiefly by fishing and hunting.
Thos. An Indo-Chinese race of Lao descent
[see Shans], in the north of Tongkmg
Thracians. The ancient inhabitants of Thrace,
on the west of the Black Sea. Their origin is
dubious, but they are generally assumed to
have belonged to the Aryan family, and been
related to the Teutons and the Greeks. They
were wild hill tribes, who acquired in later days
a certain amount of Roman culture and spoke
the Latin language. There is .some probability
that they were the ancestors of the Vlachs or
Roumanians (q.v.).
Thuringians. A High German tribe inhabit-
ing Thuringia in the fifth century, probably a
branch of the Suevi (q.v.). Now merged into
the modern Saxons.
Tibetans, or Bod-Pa. Natives of Tibet, form-
ing the Tibetan stock of the Southern Mongolic
family, and allied to the minor races of Lepchas,
Baitis, Ladakhis, etc. {q.v.). The Tibetans are akin
to the Burmese, with Mongolic features, broad-
shouldered and muscular. They are a secluded and
archaic race, with many curious customs, such as
polyandry. Their religion is full of elaborate cere-
monials, and the land abounds in monasteries.
Tibbus. A race inhabiting the oases of the
Sahara, intermediate between Berbers and
Negroes ; perhaps descended from the ancient
Garamantes (q.v.).
Timnis. See Temne Group.
Tinne, or Tinney. See Athabascan.
Tobas. .'\ warlike and predatory race of
South American Indians on the Rio Vermejo in
Bolivia.
Tocantins. See Tupi-Guarani.
Todas. An isolated group of Caucasic race
inhabiting the Nilgiri Hills, and distinguished
from the neighbouring Dravidian tribes by their
fine physique and regular features of Caucasic
type ; a dying race.
Togos. See Ewe.
Toltecs. The oldest of Nahuan (q.v.) races,
who established a semi-civilised State in Mexico
before the Aztecs.
Tongans. See Polynesians.
Tongas, or Amatonga. A Kafir race of peaceful
agriculturists, occupying Tongaland, to the north
of Zulu land.
Tonkinese. A branch of the Annamese (^.w.),
skilled in agriculture and dyke-building.
Toucouleurs. Sudanese Negroes of Sene-
gambia, probably crossed .with Hamitic blood ;
formerly dominant in the Western Sudan.
Tshi Group. A group of Sudanese Negro tribes
of the Guinea Coast, including the warlike
Ashantis, Fantis and Adansis.
Tuaregs. The predatory Berber {q.v.) Nomads
of the Sahara.
Tudas. See Dravidians.
Tumalis. See Nuba Group.
Tunguses. A branch of the Mongol stock of
the Northern Mongolic family, who lead a nomad
existence in the mountains of East Siberia and
the Amur region. They are of Mongolic physical
type, with square skalls, low stature, and wiry,
well-knit figures. They are distinguished by
fine moral qualities, a fearless race of hunters,
industrious, trustworthy, and self-reliant. Their
main tribes are the Lamuts, or " sea people,"
Orochs, Chapogirs, Golds, and Tazis. The
modern Tunguses probably represent the primi-
tive stock of the Manchus (q.v.).
Tupi-Guarani. A wide-spread family of South
American Indians, in Brazil, including numerous
distinct tribes, of which the Chiriguanas of
Bolivia, Caribunas of the Rio Negro, Paraguay
Indians, Tupinambas of the Para coast, Mun-
drucus of the Tapajos, Omaguas, Goajiris and
Tocantins, are the most important. They are
copper-coloured, thick-set and muscular, with
broad features, black hair and sometimes
obliquely set eyes. They are of apathetic
nature, and are slow to acquire civilisation.
Tupinambas. See Tupi-Guarani.
Turanian. An ethnological term, now aban-
doned, roughly corresponding to the Northern
Mongolic or LVal-Altaic family.
Turguts. See Kalmuks.
Turkanas. An African Hamitic race, allied
to the Masais {q.v.), and dwelling between Lake
Rudolf and the Nile.
Turki, or Turks. An important and wide-
spread stock oi the Northern Mongolic family,
dwelling in Central Asia, Asia Minor, and in
European Turkey. The primitive Turki s<:ock
— the Chinese Tu-kiu and ancient Turca; —
seem to have inhabited the Altai region as
early as the second century B.C. Thence they
spread far and wide, and founded many powerful
and predatory, but unstable empires. The
Huns {q.v.) who followed Attila were largely of
Turki stock. Their chief modem race is that
of the Ottoman Turks [see Turks], who raised
their empire on the ruins of Constantinople in
1453. Other Turki races are the Yakuts,
Usbegs, Naimans Andijanis, Nogais, Tartars,
Bashkirs, Kizil-Bashis, Anatolian Turks, etc.
They are clo.sely allied to the Kirghiz, Kipchaks,
AN ALPHABET OF THE WORLD'S RACES
Kara-Kalpaks and Turkomans (q.v.). The Turki
physical type, of Mongol origin, has been modilied
by intermixture with Caucasic races.
Turks, Osmanlis, or Ottoman Turks. The
dominant inhabitants of the Turkish Empire
in Europe and Asia Minor, the most powerful
of Turki races. They trace their descent from
the Seljuks, a confederacy of Turki tribes who
were settled on the Jaxartes in the eleventh
century, and there adopted Islam. They
conquered Persia and established kingdoms in
Syria — the great Saladin was one of their
princes — and Asia Minor, or Anatolia. The
true Ottoman Turks entered the service of the
Seljuk rulers in the thirteenth century, being
driven from Kharasan by the advance of the
Mongol hordes, and under Othman and his
successors they became the dominant Turk
race. They reared a great military power, and
soon invaded Europe, where they destroyed
the Eastern Empire in the middle of the fifteenth
century and founded the still existing Turkish
Empire. The Ottoman Turks are proud, ignor-
ant and fanatical, but honourable and upright.
They make admirable soldiers, when properly
led, but arc surpas ed in the arts of peace by their
subject races, Greeks, Bulgarians, Jews, etc.
Turkom;ins. A race of Turki nomads who
inhabit the steppes east of the Caspian and
south of the Oxus. They include such tribes
as the Chaudors, Tekkes (Akhal and Merv),
Salors, Yomuds, Goklen, and Ali-Elis. They
were formerly noted for their predatory and
man-stealing habits, but under Russian rule
have been forced to live a more peaceful life, m
Tusayas. See Pueblo Indians.
Tuscaroras. North American Indians. See
Iroquoian.
Tushis. See Chechenzes.
Tushilange. A branch of the Baluba (q.v.).
Tutclos. See Siouan.
Tyrolcse. Natives of the Tyrol, the ancient
Rhaetia, a mountainous district now belonging
to the Austrian Empire. They are of High
German Teutonic stock, and are noted for
their patriotism and bravery, illustrated by their
resistance under Hofer to the arms of Napoleon.
They are industrious and thrifty, but backward
in education, and devout Catholics.
Tyrrhenes. An ancient pre-Hellenic race of
Greece, found in Thrace and Etruria, who prob-
ably belonged to the Pelasgian stock of the Hamitic
family, giving birth to the Etruscans (q.v.)..
Ugrian. A branch of the Finno-Ugrian
stock (q.v.) including the Samoyedes, Voguls,
Ostyaks, Soyots and Siryanians of Siberia, the
Permian Finns of Russia, and the Magyars of
Hungary. See under these heads.
Umbquas. See Athabascan.
Umbrians. An ancient Italic race, perhaps
allied to the Etruscans (q.v.) or the Samnites,
afterwards subjugated by Rome.
Ural-Altaic. A term applied to the Northern
Mongolic family of races, corresponding nearly
to the older Turanian. It includes the Mongol,
Turki, Finno-Ugrian, Siberian, and Koreo-
Japanese stocks.
Uruts. See Sharras.
Utahs. See Shoshonean.
Uzbegs. Nomadic Turki race of the Oxus Basin.
Vaalpens. A Negrito race of the Kalahari
Desert, probably a half-breed between Bechuanas
and Bushmen, formerly the serfs of the dominant
Bantu races, but now freed under British
rule.
Vandals. A Teutonic race, settled at the
dawn of the Christian era in North-east Germany
between the Oder and the Vistula. Like the
Goths, whom they physically resembled, they
were a warlike and roving race. Early in the
fifth century they invaded Gaul and formed a
settlement in Spain, where Andalusia (anciently
Vandalitia) preserves their name. Later, under
the fierce Genseric, they crossed to Africa and
over-ran Mauretania, where they established
a short-lived piratical Empire. In 534 it was
destroyed by a Bvzantine army under Belisarius,
and the Vandals thereafter disappeared as a
separate race. Their name has become a by-
word on account of their turn for devastation.
Vaudois. See Waldenses.
Veddahs. A primitive hunting people of
Ceylon, who are sometimes classed as Dravidian,
but more probably represent the still older
(Negrito ?) aborigines of the island. They are
dwarfish, of dark complexion, with features
intermediate between the Hindu and Papuan
types. They rank among the ruclest and least
civilised of races, being equally unable to laugh,
count, or cook. They are dying out.
Vcis, or Vey. A Sudanese Negro race, of
Mandingan stock, on the West Coast of Africa,
who are said to be the only Negro race who
have invented an alphabet.
Venezuelans. White natives of Venezuela, of
Spanish descent. Most of them are crossed with
Indian blood.
Vikings. See Norsemen.
Visigoths. See Goths.
Voguls. A nomadic Finno-Ugrian race who
inhabit both slopes of the Urals. They closely
resemble the Ostyaks and Samoyedes (q.v.). m
Vuaregga, Vuarua, Vuarunga, Vuavinza.
Bantu Negro tribes inhabiting the Congo basin
and the Tanganyika district.
Wachaga. A predatory Bantu race on the
southern slopes of Kilimanjaro.
Wadai Group. A group of Sudanese Negro
tribes inhabiting Wadai and East Darfur,
including Birkits, Massalits, Korungas, Mabas
(mixed with Hamitic blood), and other tribes.
They are mainly of pastoral habit.
Waganda. A Bantu Negro race who founded
the kingdom of Uganda and attained a remark-
able degree of civilisation before the arrival of
white men. They are very intelligent, and their
skill in the industrial arts has caused them to be
called the Japanese of Africa. They are also
warlike, and formerly indulged in frequent
plundering and slave hunting raids among the
surrountling races.
Wagogo. A Bantu Negro race of German
East Africa.
Wahehe. See Wasagara.
Wa-Huma. A conquering pastoral race, of
Eastern Hamitic stock, who migrated from
Gallaland and penetrated as far south as Unyam-
wezi, founding various kingdoms on the way.
They are of Hamitic features, fair complexion,
and tall stature ; very warlike. The ruhng
classes of Uganda and Unyoro are of Wa-Huma
origin. The Wa-Huma are a branch of the
Gallas (q.v.). Among their tribes are the
Wajiji, Warundi, Waruanda, etc.
347
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
W&jiji. Sec Wa-Huma.
Waldenses, or V&udois. A heretical sect which
originated in the South of France in the twelfth
century, and was formed into a separate race by
persecution ; of French, Swiss, and Italian
elements. They are now settled in Savoy.
Walloons. Natives of South-eastern Belgium,
of mixed Celtic and Romanic stock, probably
descended from the ancient Belgae (q.v.). They
are tall, bony, and of strong physique, and are
very successful in industry, as shown in the
great manufacturing town of Liege.
Wanyamwezi. A warlike Bantu race of
German East Africa, who formerly composed
a powerful predatory state.
Wanyoro. Natives of Unyoro, in British East
Africa, of Bantu race, skilled in industrial arts,
and formerly allied with Arab slave-traders.
Wapisianas. See Arawaks.
Wapokomo. The chief Bantu race of the Tana
basin, skilled boatmen and hunters, formerly
under Masai domination, now acquiring civilisa-
tion under British rule.
Warraus. An aboriginal Indian race of
British Guiana.
Warua. A powerful, warlike, and barbarous
Bantu race of the Lualaba district in the Congo
Free State, forming a powerful native state,
and skilled in industry and rude art.
War«anda, Warundi. See Wa-Huma.
Wasagara. A warlike and widespread Bantu
people of German East Africa ; fierce moun-
taineers, much given to marauding. The
Wahehe, who claim Zulu affinities, are one of
their tribes.
Waswahili. See Swahilis.
Wataveita. A mild and settled agricultural
Bantu race inhabiting the slopes of Kilimanjaro
in German East Africa.
Welle Group. A group of Sudanese Negro
races inhabiting the region of the Upper Welle
River in Central Africa, including the cannibal
Niam-Niam, or Azandeh, the Mangbattu, Nsak-
kara, Amadi, .^babua, and other tribes.
Welsh, or Cymry. The chief surviving branch
of the Brythonic or P Celts, inhabiting Wales,
where they preserve their ancient language and
customs. They probably represent the ancient
Britons who inhabited England at the time of
the Anglo-Saxon inmiigrations. " An old and
haughty nation, proud in arms."
Wends. A stock of the Western Slavonic
family, settled in the north and east of Germany
in the sixth century. They were gradu-ally
absorbed by the Teutonic Germans. A remnant
of the Wendish race, preserving their ancient
language and customs, survives in Lusatia, on
the borders of Saxony and Prussia, where they
are niso known as Sorbs.
Winnebagos. See Siou.an.
Wochuas. See Pygmies.
Wolofs. Sudanese Negroes, dwelling between
Lower Sen* gal and Gambia ; very black, but with
regular features, indicating a trace of Hamitic
blotxl. Their chief branch is that of the jolofs.
Wulwas. Sec Lencan.
Xanthochroi. A suggested division of
Caucasic Man, opposed to the Melanochroi, cha-
racterised by fair hair, blue eyes, and rosy
complexion. It wouUi thus include the Teutonic,
Scandinavian, and Slavonic stocks oi the Aryan
family.
Xosas, or Amaxosa. The southern stock of
the Kafir race {q.v.), allied to the Zulus, or
northern stock. They are eminently warlike,
and have an interesting system of social organ-
isation. They are of Bantu origin, immigrants
from the north, who have dispossessed the
Hottentot or Bushman aborigines. They are
tall, well-built, and muscular, with Negro features
and complexion, and woolly hair. They are
semi-nomadic cattle-breeders and hunters, but
many have taken to the settled pursuits of
agriculture. They were long at war with the
British and Boer settlers, but are now a peaceful
and contented people under British nde.
Yakuts. A Mongolic race of Turki stock,
inhabiting the province of Yakutsk in East
Siberia. They are of middle height, with black
hair, flat noses, and narrow eyes. They are
laborious and enterprising, and show more
aptitude for civilisation than the Buriats or
Tunguses. They inhabit log " yurtas " in winter,
but camp out in summer. Cattle-breeding, and
to a less degree agriculture, are their chief
occupations.
Yankees. Natives of the New England States.
In a wider sense, the northern inhabitants of the
United States.
Yaos. Agricultural aborigines of French
Indo-China, perhaps allied to the Chinese proper.
Yedinas. See Lake Chad Group.
Yomuds. See Turkomans.
Yorubas. A group of Sudanese Negro races
inhabiting the eastern half of the Slave Coast
district, and united by a common Yoruba
language, though much broken up by political
feuds. They are peacefully disposed, indus-
trious, and friendly to strangers. Their main
pursuit is agriculture, but they also practise
many industries ; they are the best architects
in Africa. Their chief tribes are those of Egba,
Jebu, Oworo, Ondo, Ife, and Oyo. Abeokuta,
the Egba capital, owes its fame to the success
with which it held out as a city of refuge against
the slave-hunters of Dahomey and Ibadan.
Yukaghirs. A nomadic tribe of north-east
Siberia, probably identical with the Tunguses
(q.v.).
Yumas. See Opata-Pima.
Yuruks. A nomadic Turki race in the Konia
vilayet of Turkey-in-Asia
Yusufzais. See Afghans.
Zambos. See Sambos.
Zaparos. South American Indians, on the
Upper Napo in Peru.
Zapotecs. Central American Indians of Oajaca
in Mexico.
Zendals, Zotzils. See Mava-Quiche.
Zulus, or Amazulu. A very warlike Bantu
race, allied to the Xosas and other Kafir tribes,
whom they resemble in physique and organisa-
tion. Originally a small Kafir clan, the ZuUis
were raised to eminence at the beginning of the
nineteenth century by the genius of Tchaka, a
kind of Negro Napoleon, who established a
severe military despotism, and dominated South
Africa from the Zambesi to Cape Colony by the
courage and military skill of his regiments.
Tchaka's descendants ruled Zululand proper,
and waged war against Kafirs, Boers, and
English, until their country was annexed by
Britain in 1887. The Zulus are both physically
and imntally one of the finest of .\frican races.
Zunis. See Pueblo Indians.
TYPES OF THE CHIEF LIVING RACES OF MANKIND
15. Ladioiif Islander
16. Hindu
17. Samang:
18. Negrito
349
TYPES OF THE CHIEF LIVING RACES OF MANKIND
^^U
^
K.
23. Kalmuck
24. Kamchadale
25. Aleoutian
32. Kiitchin Indian
33. Chili Indian
34. Yucatan Indian
35. Fuegian
350
GROUPED ACCORDING TO PHYSIOLOGICAL RELATIONSHIP
36. Jeba Negro
37. Beja
38. Sahara Negro
42. North Australian 43. West Australian
44. South Australian
45. Tasmanian
46. Tikopia Islander
<r^
47. Maori
48. Samoan
W '
49. Melaiiesian (Vaiiikoro Island) 50. Melaiiesian (Npw Hebrides)
SI. Fijian
351
ETHNOLOGICAL CHART OF THE HUAAN RACE
This Chart, intended for reference in connection with the Dictionary of
Races beginning on page 311, gives a view of the various main divisions,
famiUes, and stocks into which the human race is divided by ethno-
logists. It is impossible to give a complete list of the individual races
within the necessary limits, but the chief typical races are named under each
stock in the right-hand column. The races marked with an asterisk are extinct
ETHIOPIC DIVISION
iiily Stuck
\ Hottentot Bushman
Pygtny
<Z
g ( Papuan
Melanesian
A ustralian
ill
Negrito
rWochua
-! Alvka
vObongo
/ New Guinea
\ natives
( Fijian
I Solomon
(^ Islanders
/'Australian
\ aborigines
l^Tasmanian*
(hn
-^Sa
l^Ae
'Aiitlamanese
Sakai
Veta
MONGOLIC DIVISION
Family Stock Typical races
rSharra
J Kalinuk
I liuriat
(, I un};us
{Turks
Tartars
B.ashkirs
Kirshiz
Turkoman
Samoyede
Magyar
Finno-Ugrian \ Finn
Hulgar
Lapp
Chukchi
Kamchadale
/. , . i Korean
horeo.Ja/>anese\^^^^^^^^^
Dravidian {J) Tamil
Mongol
Turki
Sibe
Tibetan
Indo-Chinese
Chinese
Malaysian
Malagasy
P!iili/i/>ine
portnosiin
/"Tibetan
I lialti
\ l.ushai
/^Hurinese
J Siamese
j Hhil
I Annamese
rChiiicse
\ Punti
l,Lolo
/"Mala'
\ Dvak
Uava,,
/ Visayan
( Ilocano
AMERICAN DIVISION
Family
Arctic
Stock
Eskimo
A thabascan
Algongiiian
Iroquoian
Thiinkit
Haida
Chinook
Shoshonean
Muskhogean
Natchez
Kio7ua
Saiish
Pueblo
/ Otomi
Opata-Pima
Cuaicuri
Nahuan
Maya-Quichi
Lencan
Rribri
Talamanca
y.afiotec
Miztec
Chorotcgan
Inca
Ayiiiara
Chibcha
Choco
Za'^aro
Jiziaro
Mojo
Chiquito
Barr^
Charrua
Chuncho
Conibo
Carib
ArawcJt
Warrau
Botocudo
Tupi-Guarani
Payagua
Matacoan
J 06a
Araucanian
Puelche
Patai;onian
\ J'urj^ian
Typical races
/ Eskimo
\ Aleutian
/ Apache
\ Navajo
I Delaware
< Mohican
VHlackfoot
I Huron
J. Mohawk
\ Cherokee
Thiinkit
Haida
Chinook
/"Sioux
-! Dakota
I^Omaha
/Shoshone
Utah
I Comanche
(_l'awnee
j Choktaw
\ Seminole
Natchez*
Kiowa
Flathead
(Zun'x
\ Taos
Otomi
{Cora
Tarahumara
Guaicuri
Tarascan
TToltec
\ Aztec
I, Mexican
?Maya
\ Quiche
^ Huastec
{Chontal
(iuatusa
Bribri
Talamanca
Zapotec
M iztec
Chorotegan
/ Quichua
\ Chanca
Aymara
Chibcha
Choco
Zaparo
Jivaro
Mojo
Chiijuito
Barr6
Charrua*
Chuncho
Conibo
{Macusi
Kucuyenne
/ Maypuri
\ Wapisiana
Warrau
I'otocudo
( Par.aguay
I Caribuna
V_Tupinamba
Payagua
Matacoan
Toba
Araucanian
f Puelche
\ ( laucho
Pal.iucnian
Kuruian
CAUCASIC DIVISION
Family
Stock
(Eastern
Typical races
(Egyptian
Somali
Galla
Masai
TNumidian herber
Iberian j ^?^1"^
lyesternl,. . ^P'"*
j Ligunan Corsican
lpela«-i=.n/ii'yce"aean*
^Pelasgian | '^^
Assyrian
Ara»i(ean
Canaanite
Arab
Himyarite
I Hindu
Iranian
Hellenic
Italic
Keltic
/"Goidelic
or
]<i Kelts
1 Hryt
I
^PK
thonic
or
elts
Slavonic
Scandinavian
r Low
German
Teutonic
High
[German
■j ( Southern
<] Western
%_ I Eastern
r \ ^
Polynesian
Chaldeean*
/ Syrian
1 Hittite*
I Israelite
-| Phoenician*
VCarihaginian'
/Arab
\ Bedouin
Abyssinian
/ Punjabi
\ Bengali
Afghan
Persian
Armenian
.Kurd
/Albanian
\ Greek
r Roman
j Italian
I French
- Spanish
I Portuguese
I Latin
^ American
Irish
Manx
Highland
Scottish
AVelsh
\ Breton
(Cornish*
/ Lithuanian
\ Lettish
Russian
Czech
Polish
Servian
/^Norwegian
-[ Swedish
i Danish
Old Saxon*
Dutch
Flemish
Anglo-Saxon
Cierman
Saxon
Swiss
Austrian
Georgian
Circassian
/Chechenz
\ Lesghian
rSamoan
\ Maori
l_Mar(|uesan
352
MAKIN
IONS
AND
NATURE
THE BIRTH & GROWTH OF NATIONS
BY PROFESSOR RATZEL
IN order that the cosmic conception of the
^ hfe of man may be more than a mere
isolated idea, incapable of being applied
and developed, it is necessary to indicate
the relation which human life bears to the
collective life of the earth.
Human existence is based upon the
entire development of vegetable and ani-
mal life ; or, as Alexander von Humboldt
said, in reality the human race partakes of
the entire life on earth. Just as plants and
animals, vegetable and animal remains and
products, occupy an intermediate position
between man and the inanimate substance
of the earth, so almost without exception
the life of man depends not directly upon
the earth, but upon the animals and
plants, which in turn are im-
mediately bound to the earth
by the necessities of existence.
It is the dependence of later
and more evolved types upon the earlier
and less evolved. In 1845 Robert Mayer,
the German scientist, pubhshed his epoch-
making thesis on " The Relations of
Organic Motion to Metabolism," in which
he described the vegetable world as a
reservoir wherein the rays of the sun are
transformed into life-supporting material
and are stored up for use. According to
his view the physical existence of the
human race is inseparably linked together
with this " economic providence " ; and
he even went so far as to connect it with
the instinctive pleasure felt by every eye
at the sight of luxuriant vegetation.
The history of mankind shows how
various are the elements contained in
this reservoir, and how manifold their
23
Man is
Bound up with
the Earth
action. Originally plants and animals
share the soil with man, who must struggle
with them for its possession. The plains
favour and the forests obstruct historical
movement ; the inhabitant of the tropics
is hardly able to overcome the growth of
Man's Fi ht ^^^"^^ that covers his field ;
with Pialls l^'i,^^^ Esquimau the vege-
and Animals table world exists but two
months m the year, and then
only in stunted, feeble species. The unequal
distribution of edible plants has in a large
measure been the cause of divergence in
the developments of different races. Aus-
tralia and the Arctic countries have
received almost nothing ; the Old World
has had abundance of the richest gifts
showered upon it, Asia receiving more
than Africa or Europe. The most valu-
able of domestic animals are of Asiatic
origin. America's pre-European history is
incomparably more uniform than that of
the Old World, and this is owing to her
moderate endowment of useful plants
and almost complete lack of domestic
animals. The transplanting of vegetable
species from one part of the earth to
another, carried on by man, is one of the
greatest movements in the collectiv-e life of
the world. Its possibilities of
extension cannot be conjec-
tured; for the successful
diffusion of single cultivated
plants — the banana, for example — over a
number of widely separated countries is yet
problematical. This process can never be
considered to have come to an end so long
as necessity forces man to get a firmer and
firmer hold on the store of earthly Ufe.
353
Spreading
Life Over
all the Earth
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
The relations of man to the earth are
primarily the same as those of any other
form of life. The universal laws of the
diffusion of life include also the laws of
the diffusion of the human species. Hence
the study of the geograi:)hical distribution
of man must be looked upon only as a
branch of the study of the geographical
distribution of life, and a succession of the
conceptions belonging to the latter.
To these conceptions belong the main
area of distribution, the habitable world,
and all its various parts : zones, continents,
and other divisions of the earth's surface,
especially seas, coasts, interiors of lands,
bordering regions, divisions exhibiting
continuity with others as links in a chain,
and isolated divisions. Also relations as
to area : the struggle for territory, varia-
tions in the life development in small or
inextensive regions, in insular or in conti-
nental districts, on heights of land and
plateaus, and, in addition, the hindrances
and the aids to development presented
by different conformations ; the advance
development in small, densely populated
districts ; or the protection afforded by
isolated situations. All must
be included. Finally, proper-
The Material
Tie that Binds
Men Together
ties of boundaries must be
conceived of as analogous to
phenomena occurring on the peripheries of
living bodies.
As races are forms of organic life, it
follows that the state cannot be compre-
hended otherwise than as an organised
being ; every people, every state is organic,
as a combination of organic units. More-
over there is something organic in the
internal coherence of the groups and indi-
viduals from which a state is formed.
However, in the case of a people and a
state, this coherence is neither material
nor structural ; states are spiritual and
moral organisms. But, together with the
spiritual, there is also a material coherence
between the individual members of a race
or a nation. This is the connection with
the ground. The ground furnishes the
only material tie that binds individuals
together into a state ; and it is primarily
for this reason that all history exhibits
a strong and ever-increasing tendency to
associate the state with the soil — to root
it to the ground, as it were.
The earth is not only the connecting
princi])le, but it is also the single tangible
and indestructible proof of the unity of
the state. This connection does not
354
decrease during the course of history, as
might be supposed, owing to the pro-
gressive development of spiritual forces ;
on the contrary, it ever becomes closer,
advancing from the loose association of a
few individuals with a proportionately
wide area in the primitive community, to
the close connection of the dense popula-
tion of a powerful state with
^ * * its relatively small area, as in
. S l ^^^^ '^^^^ °^ ^ modern civilised
nation. In spite of all dis-
turbances, the economic and political end
has ever been to associate a greater and
greater number of individuals with the
soil. Hence the law that every relation
of a race or tribe to the ground strives to
take a political form, and that every
political structure seeks connection with
the ground. The notion of an unterri-
torial and a territorial epoch in the
history of man is incorrect ; ground is
necessary to every form of state, and also
to the germs of states, such as a few
negroes' huts or a ranch in the Far West.
Development consists only in a constant
increase in the occupation and use of land,
and in the fact that, as populations grow,
so do they become ever more firmly
rooted in their own soils.
At the same time the nature of the
movements of peoples must change.
Penetration and assimilation of one race
by another occur instead of displacement
of one by another ; and with the rapid
decrease of unoccupied territory the fate
of the late-comers in history is irrevocably
sealed. Since the state .is an organism
composed of independent individuals and
households, its decay cannot be analogous
to the death and corruption of a plant or
an animal. When plants decay, the cells
of which they are composed decay also.
But in a decayed state the freed individuals
live on and unite together into new
political organisms ; they increase, and
the old necessity for growth continues in
the midst of the ruin. The
If One State ^ ^^ nations is not de-
Embraced the ^tj.yctJo„ jt jg j^ remodelling.
Whole Earth , r .• a ;
a transformation. A great
political institution dies out ; smaller insti-
tutions arise in its place. Decay is a life
necessity. Nothing could be more in-
correct than the idea that the growth of
nations would come to an end were one
state to embrace the whole earth. If this
were to happen, long before the great
moment of union came, there would be
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
a multitude of processes of growth already
in operation, ready to rebuild in case
of decadence, and to provide for a
new organisation if needed. As yet the
political expansion of the white races over
the earth has not resulted in uniformity,
but in manifoldness.
All conditions and relations of peoples
and states that may be geographically
described, delineated, sur-
th! Movements ^'^^^^^ ^"^' ^°^ ^^^ greater
p y"*"* * part, even measured, can be
eop cs traced back to movements —
movements that are peculiar to all forms
of life, and of which the origin is growth
and development. However various these
movements may be in other respects, they
are always connected with the soil, and
thus must be dependent upon the extent,
situation, and conformation of the ground
upon which they take place. Therefore, in
ev^ery organic movement we may perceive
the activity of the internal motive forces
which are peculiar to life, and the influences
of the ground to which the life is attached.
In the movements of peoples, the internal
forces are the organic powers of motion
common to all creatures, and the spiritual
impulses of the intellect and will of man.
In many a view of history these forces
alone appear ; but it must not be for-
gotten that they are conditioned by the
fact that they cannot be active beyond
the general limits of life, and they cannot
disengage themselves from the soil to
which life is bound. In order to under-
stand historical movements it is first
necessary to consider their purely
mechanical side, which is shown clearly
enough by an inquiry into the nature of
the earth's surface. Neglect of this
occasions a delay in the understanding of
the true character of such movements.
Men merely spoke of geograjihy, and
treated history as if it were an atmospheric
phenomenon.
Nations are movable bodies whose units
are held together by a common origin,
language, customs, locality,
a ^ona. ^^^j qj^^^^ necessity for defence
. „. . — the strongest tie of all.
in History . . ^ , .
A people expands m one
direction and contracts in another ; in case
of two adjacent nations, a movement in the
one betokens a movement in the other.
Active movements are responded to by
passive, and vice versa. Every movement
in an area filled with life consists in a
displacement of individuals. There are
also currents and counter-currents : when
slavery was abohshed in the Southern
States of America, an emigration of white
men from the South was followed by an
influx of ex-slaves from the North, thus
causing an increase in the black majority
of the South.
Such external movements of peoples
assume most varied forms. History takes
a too narrow view in considering only the
migrations of nations, looking upon them
as great and rare events, historical storms
as it were, exceptional in the monotonous
quiet of the life of man. This conception
of historical movements is very similar to
the discarded cataclysmic theory in
geology. In the history of nations, as in
the history of the earth, a great effect
does not always involve a presupposition
of its being the immediate result of a
mighty cause. The constant action of
small forces that finally results in a large
aggregate of effect must be taken into
account in history as well as in geology.
Every external movement is preceded by
internal disturbance : a nation must grow
from within in order to spread abroad.
The increase of Arabs in
^M ^x o * \°^^ Oman led to an emigration to
Must Seek t- ^ at • 1 u- i. c
^ „ East Africa along highways of
trattic known to times of old.
Merchants, craftsmen, adventurers, and
slav^es left their native land and drew
together in Zanzibar, Pemba, and on the
mainland. The process was repeated from
the coast to the interior, and as a result
of the aggregate labour of individuals as
merchants, colonists, and missionaries,
Arabian states grew up in the central
regions of Africa. Instances of the occu-
pation of vacant territories are of the
greatest rarity in history as we are
acquainted with it. The best example
known to us is the settlement of Iceland
by the Northmen. The rule is, a forcing
in of the immigrating nation between other
races already in possession ; the op{iosition
of the latter often compels the former to
divide up into small groups, which then
insinuate themselves peacefully among
the people already established in the land.
The movements of nations resemble
those of fluids upon the earth : they
proceed from higher altitudes to lower ;
and obstacles cause a change of course,
a backward flow, or a division. Though
at first there may be a series of streams
running along side by side, there is a
convergence at the goal, as shown by the
THE NORTHMEN TAKING POSSESSION OF ICELAND
Instances of peoples taking possession of uninhabited lands and settling therein are extremely rare. Iceland is the best
example known The hardy Northmen took possession of it in the ninth century, but found the country untenanted.
^S7
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
migration of different peoples to a common
territory ; there is concentration when
there are hindrances to be overcome, and
a spreading out where the ground is level
and secure. One race draws other races
along with it ; and, as a rule, a troop of
wanderers come from a long distance will
be found to have absorbed foreign elements
on its way. But it would be
The Human ^^^^^^ ^q \qq\^ upon the move-
ok 1 * ments of nations as passive
no Obstacle Qj^flg^yings^ or even to deduce
a natural law from the descent of tribes
from the mountains to the river valleys and
to the sea — an idea that once led to the
acceptance of the theory of the Ethiopian
origin of Egyptian civilisation. Either
the wills of individuals unite to form a
collective will, or the will of a single man
imposes itself upon the aggregate. The
human will knows no insurmountable
obstacle within the bounds of the habitable
earth.
As time goes on, all rivers and all seas
are navigated, all mountains climbed,
and all deserts traversed. But these have
all acted as obstructions before which
mov'ements have either halted or turned
aside, until finally they have burst the
barriers. At least two thousand years
passed from the time of the first journey
of a Phoenician ship out through the
Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic
until the arrival of the day when a voyage
across was ventured from Southern
Europe. The Romans turned the Alps,
both to the right and to the left,
seven hundred years after their city had
been founded, but how many nooks in
the interior of those mountains were
unknown to them even centuries later !
Yet to-day Europe feels the effect of this
circumstance, the fact that the Romans
did not advance straight through the
Central Alps into the heart of the Teutonic
country. They followed a roundabout
way through Gaul, and thus Mediterranean
culture and Christianity were
Naturr-t ^^'"o^ght to Central Europe
a urc s from the west instead of from
the south ; hence the depend-
ence of the civilisation of Germany upon
that of France.
It is precisely the Romans' who, con-
trasted with barbarians, show us that will
or design in the movements of nations
does not necessarily increase with growth
of culture, even though culture constantly
puts more means of action at its disposal,
358
improved methods of transportation, by
which the way may be lightened. The
mounted bands of Celts and Germans
crossed the Alps quite as easily as did the
Roman legions ; and in spreading about
and penetrating to every corner of the
Alps and the Pyrenees, the barbarians
were always superior to the Romans.
Wandering tribes of semi-civihsed
people are smaller, less pretentious, and
less encumbered. In every war that has
taken place in a mountain land, the
greater mobility of untrained militia
has often led to victories over regular
troops. Races of inferior culture are
invariably more mobile than those of a
higher grade of civilisation ; and they
are able to equalise the advantages of the
superior modes of locomotion with which
culture has supplied the latter. INIobility
also indicates a weaker hold upon the
ground, and thus uncivilised peoples are
more easily dislodged from their territories
than are nations capable of becoming, as
it were, more deeply rooted. In nomadic
races, mobility bound up with the necessity
for an extensive territory assumes a
definite form, and, owing to a
w * H ""** constant preparedness for
an ^rers ^^g^j^(;igj-ing and to the posses-
of the Earth ^ *=" • , ^ , •
sion of an organised marching
system, such peoples have been among the
greatest forces in Old World history.
Movements of nations are often spoken
of as if certain definite directions were
forced upon them by some mysterious
power. This view not only wraps itself
in the garment of prophecy — for example,
when announcing that the direction in
which the sun travels must also be that
of history — but it formally presupposes
a necessary east-to-west progression of
historical movements, endeavouring to
substantiate its doctrine by citation of
examples, from Julius Caesar to the gold-
seekers of California. -But this necessity
remains always in obscurity. Not only
is it contradicted by frequently confirmed
reflex movements in historical times, but
it is also disproved still more by the great
migrations which have taken place on
the same continent in contrary directions.
In Asia the Chinese have spread over the
entire area of interior plain and desert,
westward to the nation-dividing barriers
of the Pamir Mountains : other Asiatic
races have overflowed into Europe — also
from east to west. Contrariwise, ever
since the sixteenth century we have seen
HOW CIVILISATION SPREAD THROUGH EUROPE
The inexorable influence of physical conditions on the life of the peoples is well illustrated by the influence
of the Alps in deflecting the path of Mediterranean culture. These mountains hemmed in the north of the
Roman Empire and forced the Romans, in their expansion, to the west. Hence Mediterranean culture and
Christianity were carried to Central Europe from the west instead of from the south, and the civilisation
of Germany depends on that of France. The map shows the route followed by the stream of Roman civilisation.
the Russian.s at work conquering the entire
northern })art of the continent, constantly
pressing on towards the east. Even the
sea proved no obstacle, for they both
discovered and acquired Alaska during
the course of this same movement.
We shall not attach any universal
significance to such fashionable terms
employed in historical works as political
or historical attraction, elective affinity
or balance ; least of all shall we presume
to discover occult, mysterious sources for
them. It is obvious that a powerful
nation will overflow in the direction of
least resistance ; and in the case of a
strong Power confronting one that is
weak there is a constant movement
toward the latter. Thus, from the earliest
times, Egypt has pressed on toward the
south ; and everywhere in the Sudan we
find traces of similar movements to the
south as far as Adamawa, where they are
still to-day in energetic continuance.
The history of colonisation in America
shows a turning of the streams of immigra-
tion, in the south as well as in the north,
towards the more thinly settled regions ;
the more thickly populated are avoided.
The migrations of nations, which took
place during periods of history when a
surplus of unoccui)ied land existed, were
determined to a great extent by natural
causes. The more numerous nations
become, the greater the obstacles to
migration, for most of these obstacles
arise from the very nations themselves.
Nations increase with their jwpulations ;
lands with enlargement of territory. So
long as a country has sufficient area, the
second form of growth need not of necessity
follow the first — the race spreads out over
the gaps which are open in the interior,
and thus internal colonisation takes place.
If there is need for emigration, occupiable
districts may be found in the lands of
another people — for centuries Germans
359
HISTORY OF THE >3^70RLD
have thus found accommodation in
Austria, Hungary, Poland, and America.
Of course, such colonists gradually become
absorbed into the people among whom
they have settled. This is simple emigra-
tion, which is therefore connected with
the internal colonisation of a foreign land.
External colonisation first comes into
being when a state acquires
Mow New tgj-ritory under its control, into
a!e Born ^^^^^^^^ territory, if it be suit-
able, a portion of the inhabi-
tants of the state move and settle.
Colonisation is not necessarily a State
affair from the first. If a race inhabit a
country so sparsely as the Indians did
America in the sixteenth century, a
foreign people, having the power of
spreading out, may press into the gaps
with such success that this initial internal
colonisation may also be advantageous
from a political standpoint. The State then
intervenes and appropriates the territory
over which groups of its inhabitants have
previously acquired economic control.
The emigrants formed a social aggre-
gate in the new country, and from this
aggregate a state, or the germ of
a state, develops. Since such an
economic-social preparatory growth greatly
assists in the political acquirement of
land, it is obvious that this form of
colonisation is especially sound and
effectual. The opposite method follows
when a state first conquers a territory
which it occupies later with its own forces ;
this is colonisation by conquest. It can
be capable of development only when
subsequent immigration permanently
acquires the land as a dwelling-place.
Conquest that neither can nor will take
permanent possession of the soil is charac-
teristic of a low stage of culture ; thus the
Zulu states in Africa, surrounded by
broad strips of conquered yet uncon-
trolled territory, and the old " world-
empires " of Western Asia, exhausted
, themselves in vain efforts to
y ome s qV-j^^jj^ lasting increase of area
E^durtd Long through aggressive expedi-
tions. That the Roman
Empire lasted a longer time than any of
the preceding universal empires was due
to the single fact that agricultural
colonisation invariably followed in the
footsteps of its political conquests.
The enlargement of a nation's area is
associated with soil and inhabitants. If
the increase of territory — for example,
360
through conquest — is much more rapid
than the increase of population, an
inorganic, loosely connected expansion
results, which, as a rule, is soon lost again.
If, on the contrary, population increases
at a proportionately greater rate than
area, a crowding together, checks to
internal movements, and over-population
follow. In consequence, great dis-
crepancies between growth of territory
and increase of population lead to the
most varied results. The conquering
nation expands over extensive regions for
which there are no inhabitants. Passive
races in India and in China become so
crowded together that it is impossible
for their soil to support them any longer ;
hence a continuous degradation and
recurrent periods of famine, which may
bring with them a relatively feeble and
unorganised emigration.
There are nations with whom conquest
and colonisation seem to follow in most
profitable alternation : this appears to
have been the case with all colonising
countries of modern history that have
followed the example of the Roman
Empire. But there are great
contrasts presented even by
these nations. Germany,
Austria, and Russia, in im-
mediate connection with their conquered
provinces, have colonised and expanded
toward the east. In spite of a rapid
increase of population, Germany has
been backward in establishing trans-
marine colonies, while France, with a
proportionately smaller increase of popula-
tion, began by colonising in all directions,
but occupied more land than she was
able to master ; for which reason colonisa-
tion in the history of France has taken
more or less the character of conquest.
England, on the contrary, with a vigorous
emigration and an expansive movement
in all directions, presents an example of
the soundest and strongest method of
founding colonies which has been seen
since early times.
Through the entire course of history
an ever-increasing value attached to land
may be traced : and in the expansion of
nations we may also see that mere conquest
is growing less and less frequent, while
the economic acquisition of territory,
l)iece by piece, is becoming the rule. The
getting of land assumes more and more
the character of a peaceful insinuation.
The taking possession of distant countries
The Modern
Nations as
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361
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
without consideration for the original
inhabitants, who are either driven away,
or murdered — speedily with the aid of
bullets, or slowly with the assistance of
gin or contagious diseases or by being
robbed of their best land — is to-day no
longer possible. Colonisation has become
a well-ordered administration combined
with instruction of the natives
omc ew 1^ useful employments. The
p ^ m"* °^^ method has left scarcely a
single pure-blooded Indian east
of the Mississippi in the United States,
and not one native in Tasmania ; the
new method has before it the problem
how to share the land with negroes —
in the Transvaal with 74 per cent.
and in Natal with 82 per cent.
Climatic conditions are also to be taken
into consideration, for Caucasians are
able to develop all their powers in
temperate regions only ; a hot climate
impels them to ensure the co-operation of
black labour through coercion.
During the course of centuries a motley
collection of countries has developed, all
of which are called colonies, although
they stand in most striking contrast with
one another. Several are nations in
embryo, to which only the outward form
of independence is lacking ; not a few
have once been independent ; and many
give the impression that they will never
be fit for self-government. There are
some in which the native population has
become entirely extinct, such as Tasmania,
Cuba, and San Domingo ; others in which
the original inhabitants, still keeping to
their old customs and institutions, are
guided and exploited by a few white men
only ; and, finally, colonies in which the
rulers and the natives have assimilated
with one another, as in Siberia. Once
upon a time such tokens of the youth of
races as may be seen in rude but re-
munerative labour on unlimited territory
were widespread in many colonies. But
-, ... the new countries fill up visibly,
Mankind , , , , , / .
. . and even they show that man-
ges wi i^ip(^ j^g g^ whole, ages the more
Civilisation '., ,, ' fL n j
ra])idiy the more the so-called
progress of civilisation is hastened. How-
ever, an examination of the peoples of
the present day shows that the differences
in age between mother-countries and
colonies will, indeed, continue for a long
time yet. Such differences exist between
west and east Germans as well as between
New Englanders and Californians ; they
362
are even to be detected in Australia,
between the inhabitants of Queensland
and of New South Wales. Such differences
are shown not only in the characteristics
of individuals, but also in the division of
land and in methods of labour.
Divergence and differentiation are the
great factors of organic growth. They
govern the increase of nations and states
from their very beginnings. Since, how-
ever, these organisms are composed of in-
dependent units, differentiation does not
consist in an amalgamation and transfor-
mation of individuals, but in their diffusion
and grouping. Therefore the differentiation
of nations becomes eminently an affair
of geography. Never yet has a daughter
people left its mother-country to become
an independent state without a previous
disjunction having taken place. All growth
is alteration in area, and, at the same
time, change in position. The further
growth extends away from the original
situation, the sooner dismemberment fol-
lows. In Australia, New South Wales
spreads out towards the north, and at the
new central point, Brisbane, a new colony,
-, . Queensland, is formed, which
„ . . J already differs materially from
N New South Wales. And Queens-
land itself expands towards the
north, beyond the tropic of Capricorn
into the torrid zone ; and a younger,
tropical North Queensland develops.
The fact that nations hold fast to their
natural conditions of existence, even
when growth impels them towards expan-
sion in various directions, is a great con-
trolling force in historical movement.
Russia expands in its northern zone to
the Pacific ocean ; England continues its
growth on American soil, across the
Atlantic, in almost the same latitude. The
Phoenicians, as a coast-dwelling people,
remained on the coasts and on the islands ;
the colonising Greeks ever sought out
similar situations to those of their native
land ; the Netherlanders are found
everywhere in Northern Germany as
colonists of the moors and marshes. All
German colonies beyond the Alps and
the Vosges have disappeared ; and the
few Germans that remain are Latinised.
Nations that are accustomed to a limited
territory, as were the Greeks, always search
for a similar limited area ; on the other
hand, the Romans discov^ered a main
factor of empire-building in their judicious
agricultural colonisation of broad plains ;
LANDMARKS OF PAST AGES: FAMOUS FORTRESSES THAT HAVE CEASED TO BE OF USE
With the changing: conditions of politics, places once of enormous importance have often become mere curiosities.
There are in Europe to-day hundreds of useless castles, fortresses, and harbours. Even Dover Castle is of
little strategic value. The fortresses illustrated are (i) Mantua, (2) Dover, (3) Chillou, (4) Calais, (5) Verona.
Photographs by Frith and Neurdein
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
and the Russians sought and found
in Siberia the endless forests, steppes,
and vast rivers of their native land.
Every nation, in expanding, seeks to in-
clude within its area that which is of
the greatest value to it. The victorious
state acquires the best positions and drives
the conquered race into the poorest
districts. For this reason
competition between the colo-
The Genius
of the
Coloniser
nising nations has become very
keen ; they all judge of the
character of territory according to the same
standard. Therefore, wherever England
has colonised, only a gleaning remains for
the rest of the Northern and Central
European Powers.
Differentiation, arising from the valua-
tion of land, is the cause of a constant
creation of new political values and of a
constant lapsing of old. Every portion of
the world has its political value, which,
however, may become dormant, and must
then be either discovered or awakened.
Such a discovery was the selection of the
Pirreus as the harbour for Athens from
among a number of bights and bays.
Every settlement and every founding
of a city is at bottom an awakening of dor-
mant political value. Capacity for recog-
nising this value is a part of the genius of a
statesman, whose policy may be called far-
seeing }:)artly because he is able to discern
the dormant value while yet on the
most distant horizon. It is obvious that
political values vary ; each is determined
by the point of view from which it is
looked upon. The French and the German
valuations of the Rhine borderland are
very different. Every nation endeavours
to realise the political value which it
recognises ; and in respect to political
growth, ends are set up in the shape of the
portions of the earth to which that gi"owth
aspires. Peculiarities in the conformation
of states may be traced back to an appre-
ciation of the value of coasts, passes,
^i ».r ,, estuaries, and the like. With
The World
is Being
Centralised
the spreading out and the con-
centration of nations, such
}:)ortions of the world as are
important from a political point of view
have marvellously increased both in
number and in value. But for this very
reason a choice of selection has become
necessary, and this we see in the use of
fewer Aljiine passes during the age of
railways than before, and in the concen-
tration of a great commerce into fewer
364
seaports — into such as are capable of
accommodating vessels of the deepest
draught. Others must withdraw from
competition. To-day there are hundreds
of worthless harbours, passes, and for-
tresses in Europe that were once situated
on the highways of historical movement ;
now, however, they are avoided, deserted
by the current of traffic.
There are more things necessary to
an understanding of the dependence of
history on natural conditions than a mere
knowledge of the land upon which the
development has taken place, particularly
than a mere knowledge of the ground as
it was when history found it. Although
each country is in itself an independent
whole, it is at the same time a link in a
chain of actions. It is an organism in
itself, and, in respect to a succession or a
group of lands forming a whole, of which
it is a member, it is also an organ. Some-
times it is more organism than organ ;
sometimes the opposite is true ; and an
eternal struggle goes on between organism
and organ. If the latter be a subjected
... . province, a tributary state, a
All the J U4. t. 1
„ .. . . , daughter country, a colony, or
Rubbish of '^L r -V J J.- i.V,
-,. ... ,. member 01 a coniederation, the
Civilisation ... . . ■, -. .
strivmg lor mdependence is
always a struggle for existence.
This by no means presupposes a state
of war. Not only war, but the out-
wardly peaceful economic development
of the world's industries reduces
organisms to organs. When the whole-
sale importation of bad but cheap pro-
ducts of European industries into
Polynesia or Central Asia causes decay in
the production of native arts and crafts, it
is a loss to the life of the whole people ;
henceforth the race will be placed in the
same category with tribes that must gather
rubber, prepare palm-oil, or hunt elephants
to supply European demand, and who in
turn must purchase threadbare fabrics,
spirits that contain sulphuric acid, worn-
out muskets, and old clothes — in a word,
all the rubbish of civilisation.
Their economic organisation dies ; and in
many cases this is also the beginning of the
decline and extinction of a people. The
weaker organism has succumbed to the
more powerful. Is the case so different —
that of Athens, unable to live without
the corn, wood, and hemp of the lands on
the Northern Mediterranean coast ? — or
of England, whose inhabitants would
starve were it not for the importation of
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF NATIONS
meat and grain from North
America, Eastern Europe, and
Australia ?
In vain have men sought
for characteristics in the
rocks of the earth and in the
composition of the air by
which one land might be
distinguished from another.
The idea of great, lasting,
conclusive qualitative varia-
tions in different parts of the
earth is mythical. Neither the
Hisr-
unconditionally rejected by
even Alexander von Hum-
boldt. The degeneration and
wasting away of the Ameri-
can Indians would certainly
be a less disgraceful j)heno-
menon could it be attributed
to some great natural law
instead of to the injustice,
Garden of Eden nor the
land of Eldorado belongs
to reality. There is no
country whose soil bestows
wonch^ous strength upon man
or an exuberance of fruit ful-
ness upon woman. In India
precious stones are as little
a])t to grow out of the cliffs as
silver and gold are likely to
exude from fissures in the
earth. Nor is there any basis
for the slighter dififerences
between the Old World and
the New which the philoso-
phers of history of the
eighteenth century believed
they had discovered. The
opinion that the New World
produces smaller plants, less
powerful animals, and finally
a feebler humanity, was not
MAN'S WONDERFUL TRIUMPH OVER NATURE
By irrigation the arid desert of California has been made to blossom
as the rose in the luxurious orange groves of Riverside. These views
show the desert, the method of irrigation, and the resuit of man's labour.
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
greed, and vices of the white men. In
the course of development of the
European daughter-nations in America
we cannot recognise any such great and
universal distinction. The course of his-
tory in America, just as in corresponding
periods of time in Northern Asia, in Africa,
and in Austraha, only confirms
How Man ^^^ ,^gjjgf ^^^^ j^^^^^ -^^^ matter
th E th ^ ^"^ distant from one another
they may be, whenever their
climates are similar, are destined to
be scenes of analogous historical deve-
lopments.
It is certain that, so far, one of the
greatest results of the labour of man has
been the levelling and overcoming of natural
differences. Steppes are made fertile
through irrigation and manuring ; the
contrast between open and forest land
becomes less and less — indeed the destruc-
tion of forests is being far too rapidly and
widely carried out — the acclimatisation of
men, animals, and plants causes varia-
tions to disappear more and more as time
[)asses. We can look forward to a time
when only such extremes as mountains
and deserts will remain — every\vhere else
the actions of the earth will be equalised.
The process by which this is carried
out may be described shortly. Man, in
spite of all racial and national differ-
ences, is fundamentally quite as much
of a unity as the soil upon which he
dwells ; through his labour more and more
of this character of unity is transmitted
to the earth, which, as a result, also be-
comes more and more uniform.
One of the most powerful of the ties by
which history is bound to Nature is
that of its dependence on the ground. At
the first glance any given historical
development is involved with the earth
only — the earth upon which the develop-
ment takes place. But if we search deeper
we shall find that the roots of the develop-
ment extend even to the fundamental
principles of the planetary
system. By this it is not
meant that every history
must be founded on a cosmo-
logical basis, that it must begin with the
creation, or, at least, with the destruction of
Troy, as was once thought necessary ; but it
is certainly safe to say that a philosophy
of the history of the human race, worthy
of its name, must begin with the heavens
and then descend to the earth, filled
with the conviction that all existence is
366
History
from Heaven
to Earth
fundamentally one — an indivisible con-
ception founded from beginning to end on
an identical law.
The 316,250,000 square miles of the
earth's surface is the first area with
which history has to do. Within it all
other surface dimensions are included ;
it is the standard for measurement of all
other areas, and also comprehends the
absolute limits of all bodily life. This
area is fixed and immutable so far as the
history of mankind is related to it, although
in respect to the history of the world
it is not to be looked upon as having
been unalterable in the past, or as being
likely to remain unchanged in the future.
The earth's surface may be divided
into three unlike constituent parts —
84,250,000 square miles of land, 220,000,000
square miles of water, and 13,750,000
square miles of ice-covered, and for
the greater part unexplored, land and
sea in the Northern and Southern Polar
regions. The land is the natural home
of man, and all his historical movements
begin and end upon it. The size of states
is computed according to the amount of
3.6.250.000 1^"^^ ^hich they include ; their
Miles growth has derived its nourish-
of History ""^^'"^ ^^^.^ ^he 84,250,000
square miles of earth as from
a widespread fundamental element. The
sea is not to be looked upon as an empty
space between the divisions of land,
merely separating them one from another,
for the 220,000,000 square miles of water
are also of historical importance, and the
area of every ocean and of every portion
of an ocean has its historical significance.
History has extended itself over the sea,
from island to island, from coast to coast,
at first crossing narrow bodies of water,
later broad oceans ; and states whose foun-
dations arose from connections by sea
remain dependent on the sea. The
Mediterranean held together the different
parts of the Roman Empire just as the
oceans unite the Colonies of the British
Empire.
The variations of the earth's form
from that of a perfect oblate spheroid are
so small that they may be entirely dis-
regarded from the point of view of history.
All portions of the earth's surface may be
looked upon as of equal curvature ; the
pyriform swelling which Columbus be-
lieved to be a peculiarity of the tropic zones
in the New World was merely an optical
illusion. Thus all portions are practically
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF NATIONS
similar, and uniformity obtains over
the entire earth to such an extent that
there is room left only for minor inequali-
ties in configuration. To these belong the
differences in level between lands and seas,
highlands and lowlands, mountains and
valleys. Such variations amount to very
little when compared with the earth as
a whole ; for the height of the tallest of
the Himalayas added to the earth's radius
would increase its length by about ^},^
only ; and the same may be said of the
greatest depressions beneath the level of
the sea — inequalities that cannot be re-
presented on an ordinary globe. Their
great historical significance is due chiefly to
the fact that the oceans and seas occupy
the depressions, from which the greatest
elevations emerge as vast islands.
The remaining irregularities of the
earth's surface are not sufficient to pro-
duce any permanent variations in the
diffusion of races or of states. Their
influence is merely negative ; they may
only hinder or divert the course of man
in his wanderings. Even the Himalayas
have been crossed— by the Aryans in the
west, and by the Tibetans in
rrcgu ar ^^^ ^^^^ . ^^^ British India
. E th ^^^ extended its boundaries far
beyond them to the Pamirs.
The historian is concerned with but two
of the variable qualities of the land —
differences in level and differences in
contour. Variations in constitution,
development, elementary constituents, and
the perpetual phenomena of transforma-
tion and dissolution which present a
thousand problems to the geographer,
scarcely exist for the historian. Nor are
those great inequalities, the depressions
in which the seas rest, of any interest
to him. It is indifferent whether the
greatest of such depressions be covered
by live miles of water, or, as we now
know, by almost six miles. The fact that
the Mediterranean reaches its greatest
depth in the eastern part of the Ionian
Sea has nothing whatever to do with
the history of Greece.
To be sure, there is a general connec-
tion between the depth of the Mediter-
ranean, shut up within the Straits of
Gibraltar, and the climate of the neigh-
bouring regions, which has a direct
influence on the inhabitants of Mediter-
ranean countries ; but it is a very distant
connection, and it is only mentioned here
in order to remind the reader that there
is not a single phenomenon in Nature
that is not brought home to mankind at
last. Still, as a rule, history is concerned
with the depths of the sea only in so far
as they are the resting-places for sub-
marine telegraph cables ; and this is a
fact of very recent times. It may be
said that the formation of the earth's
crust occurred at a period too
^^ * remote to have had any in-
r-.. g fluence on the history of man,
and that therefore all questions
concerning it should be left to geology.
The first statement may be admitted,
but the latter does not follow by any
means ; for if the whole Mediterranean
region from the Caucasus to the Atlas
Mountains, and from the Orontes to the
Danube, is a region of uniform conforma-
tion, it is purely by reason of a uniformity
in development. In the same manner
there is an extensive region of uniform
conformation to the north, between the
Atlantic Ocean and the Sudetic Moun-
tains in Austria.
There are great features of the earth's
conformation that are so extensive that
groups of nations share them in common.
Russia and Siberia occupy the same
plain upon which the greater portions of
Germany, Belgium, and Holland are
situated. Germany and France share
the central mountain system which ex-
tends from the Cevennes to the Sudeten,
or Sudetic Mountains. A mere participa-
tion in a common geological, feature
produces such affinity and relationship
as may be seen in the Alpine states, in
Sweden and Norway, and in the nations
of the Andes. This reminds us of the
groups of nations that surround seas ;
but that which separates the Baltic
states binds them together ; and the
mountains that unite the Swiss can-
tons also separate them from one
another. Lesser features of conforma-
tion divide countries and often exhibit
gaps and breaches in develop-
ment, for the reason that they
divide a political whole into
separate natural regions. The
history of the lowlands of North Germany
differs greatly from that of the moun-
tainous districts of the same country ;
the lowlands of the Po and Apennine
Italy are two different lands. The
gi-eat contrast between the hilly manu-
facturing west of England and the low-
lying agricultural east extends throughout
Z^7
Nature
Divides and
Unites
SCENERY THAT SHAPES CHARACTER : TH
THE MOUNTAINS
The stories of mountain peoples are very similar ; the Highlanders of Scotland, Wales, Switzerland, the Cevennes,
and Tyrol, have many characteristics m common, owing their rugged nature and independence to environment.
English history ; and in hke manner
the highlands and the lowlands are
opposed to each other in Scotland.
Wherever mountain formations occur
largely in a country, the question arises
whether, in spite of all diversity, they
unite to form a whole, or whether they
exist as separate, independent neigh-
bouring parts. The elements of the
surface formation of the earth are not
only historically important in themselves
as units, but also on account of the way
in which they are connected with one
another. We have in Greece an example
of an exceedingly intricate mountain
system in which barren plateaus are
interspersed with fertile valleys and bays.
Owing to the sea, such bays as those of
Attica, Argos, and Lamia are to a high
degree self-dependent ; they became little
worlds in themselves, independent states,
which could never have grown into a
united whole had they not been subjected
to external pressure.
The reverse of this state of disunion,
arising from the juxtaposition of a great
number of different formations, is the
division of North America into the three
great regions of the Alleghanies, the
Mississippi Valley, and the Rocky Moun-
tain plateau, which gradually merge
368
into one another and are bound into a
whole by the vast central valley. Austria-
Hungary includes within itself five
different mountain features — the Alps,
Carpathians, Sudeten, the Adriatic pro-
vinces, and the Pannonian plains. Vienna
is situated where the Danube, March, and
Adria meet, and from this centre radiates
all political unifying power. If a still
closer-knit unity is co-existent with a
diversified geological formation of insular
or peninsular nature, as in Ireland or
Italy, it follows that this unity binds the
orographic divisions into an aggregate.
The discrepancies between Apennine
Italy, Italy of the Po Valley, and Alpine
Italy, which have been evident in all
periods of history, formed, in their rise
and in their final state of subjugation to
political force, an example of dissimilarity
of mountain features existing within
peninsular unity.
The great continental slopes are also
important aids to the overcoming of
orographic obstacles to political unity.
In Germany there is a general inclination
towards the north, crossed and recrossed
by a number of mountain chains and
successions of valleys. It is not to be
denied that the intersecting elevations
have furthered political disunion. Without
A
-J-'-^ »-i^3B- i-"~J-' -^•^■"'^^'^S^^:- ." " '-IP
THE SOFTENING EFFECT OF THE RICH AND FRUITFUL LOWLANDS
Whereas mountains breed independence and rug-ged character in their inhabitants, the more fruitful lowlr.nds
develop a gentler race, loving the companionship of communities. The lowlands, also, are the homes of mixed races.
doubt, a gradual slope from the southern
part of Germany to the sea, with a
consequent partition of the country by
the rivers into strips extending from
east to west, would have been attended
by a greater political unity. Again, but
in another way, the preponderance of
any one orographic element has a unifying
effect on all the other elements, as we
have seen in North America, where the
simple, even course of development has
been in conformity with the existence of
geological formations on a large scale.
There are internal differences in for-
mation in every mountain range and in
every plain, all of which have different
influences on history. The steep fall of
the Alps on the Italian side has rendered
a descent into the plains of the Po far
easier than a crossing in the opposite
direction, where many obstacles in the
'shape of mountain steeps, elevated
plateaus, and deep river valleys surround
the outer border of the Alps. Again,
penetration from the plains to the interior
of the Alps is less diflicult in the west,
where there are no southern environing
mountains, than in the east, where there
is such a surrounding mountain chain.
The compact formation of the Alps in
the west crowds obstacles together into
a small space, where they may be overcome
24
with greater labour and in a shorter time
than in the east, among the broadened-
out chains of mountains, where there are
numerous smaller hindrances to pro-
gression spread out over a wider territory.
The route from Vienna to Trieste is twice
as long as that from Constance to Como.
In mountain passes orographic differ-
ences are concentrated within very limited
areas, and for this reason passes are of
great importance in history. The value
of gorges and defiles increases with their
rarity, and their number varies greatly in
different mountain chains. The Pindus
range is broken but once, by the cleft of
Castoreia, and an easy passage from
Northern to Central Greece is possible only
by way of Thermopylae ; the short
overland route from Persia to India is
through the Khyber or Bolan Passes. The
Rhaetian Alps are rich in defiles and gorges ;
but the mountain ridges are poor in
crossing-places, and, as a rule, the elevation
of the passes decreases towards the east.
The possibility of journeying over the
Himalayas increases as we travel west-
ward. During the Seven Years War the
great difference between the accessible,
sloping Erz-Gebirge of the Bohemian
frontier and the precipitous, fissured,
sandstone hills of the Elbe was very
apparent. Mountain passes are always
369
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
closely connected with valleys and rivers ;
the latter form the ways leading to and
from the former. The valleys of the
Reuss and the Tessin are the natural
routes to the pass of St. Gothard ; and
were it not for the gorges of the Inn and
the Etsch in the northern and the southern
Alps, the Brenner Pass would not possess
, anything like its present su-
ature s pj-g^ng importance. Wherever
Flace in , , , a.
„. such entrances to passes meet
IS ory together or cross one another,
important rallying-points either for carry-
ing on traffic or for warlike undertakings
are formed ; such places are Valais,
Valteline, and the upper valley of the Mur.
Coire is a meeting-point of not less than
five passes — the Julier, Septimer, Spliigen,
St. Bernardin, and Lukmanier. The
value of passes varies according to whether
they cross a mountain range completely
from side to side, or extend through only
a part of it. When the Augsburgers, on
the way to Venice, had got through the
Fern Pass, or that of Leefeld, the Brenner
still remained to be crossed ; but when
the Romans had surmounted the difficul-
ties of Mont Genevre, the ridges of the
Alps were no longer before them ; they
were in Gaul.
There are also passes through cross
ridges that connect mountain chains, such
as the Arlberg, that pierces a ridge extend-
ing between the northern and the central
Alj>s. Passes of this sort are of great
importance to life in the mountains, for, as
a rule, they lead from one longitudinal
valley to another, such valleys extending
between ridges being the most fertile and
protected districts in mountainous regions.
In this manner the Furka Pass connects
Valais, the most prosj)erous country of
the Alps during the time of the Romans,
with the upper Rhine valley ; and the
Arlberg connects the Vorarlberg with the
upper valley of the Inn.
Mountain passes are not only highways
for traffic, they are the arteries of the
mountains themselves. Com-
j j^ . merce along the mountain ways
p leads to settlements and to agri-
culture at heights where they
would hardly have developed had it not been
for the roads ; and the highest permanent
dwellings are situated in and about passes.
The Romans established their military
colonies in the neighl)ourhood of passes,
and the German emperors rendered the
Rh.x'tian gorges secure through settle-
370
ments. There are political territories that
are practically founded on mountain
passes. The kingdom of Cottius, tributary
to the Romans, was the land of the defiles
of the Cottian Alps ; Uri may be desig-
nated as the country of the north Gothard,
and the Brenner Pass connects the food-
producing districts of the Tyrol with,
one another.
The transition point from one geological
formation to another is invariably the
boundary line between two districts that
have different histories. The movements
in one region bring forces to bear on the
movements in the other. Hence the
remarkable phenomena which occur on
mountain borderlands. The historical
effects of mountainous regions are opposed
by forces that thrust themselves in from
without ; external powers anchor them-
selves, as it were, in the mountains, seek-
ing to obtain there both protection and
frontier lines. Rome encroached more
and more upon the Alps, first from the
south, and then from the west and the
north, by extending her provinces.
Austria, Italy, Germany, and France
n ... r- . , have drawn up to the Alps on
Battlefields -t-rr - j -i 1
, ., , . dmerent sides ; they merely
of Mountain r n i_ i \v, ^ ■
„ . , . tall back upon the mountains,
Borderlands , ^., . . ,.
however ; their centres he
beyond. The same phenomenon is shown
in the regions occupied by different races.
Rhsetians, Celts, Romans, Germans, and
Slavs have penetrated into the Alps ; but
the bulk of their populations have never
inhabited the mountainous districts. The
question as to which nation shall possess
a mountain chain or pass is always decided
on the borders. Here are the battlefields ;
here, too, are the great centres of traffic
whose locations put one in mind of
harbours situated at points where two
kinds of media of transmission come into
contact with each other. This margin,
like that of the sea, also has its promon-
tories and bays.
Height of land obstructs historical move-
ments and lengthens their course. The
Romans remained at the foot of the Alps
for two centuries before they made their
way into them, forced to it by the constant
invasion of Alpine robbers who descended
from the heights as if sallying forth from
secure fortresses. Long before this the
Romans had encircled the western side
of the Aljis and had begun to turn the
eastern side. The colonies on the Atlantic
coast of America, the predecessors of the
THE BANDITS WIFE
ThP effect of life in the hills is clearly seen in this picture by Leopold Robert, whopainted it after living among the
"Brigands of he Momta ns " and stu/ying their wilcfand picturesque life. The assocfat.on of peoples with mountains
devellpsa rugged character and gives tliat strength and independence which mountain races have displayed in history.
United States, had been in existence for
almost two hundred years before they
passed the Alleghanies^ and it is certain
that this damming up of the powerful
movement towards the west, which arose
later, had a furthering influence on the
economic and political development of
the young states. The passes of the
Pyrenees occur at about two-thirds
of the distance from the level ground
to the summits of the mountains ; in
the Alps the elevation of the gorges is
but one-half or one-third that of the
mountain tops ; hence, as a whole, the
Alps are more easy of access than the
Pyrenees. The Colorado plateau is a
greater obstacle than the Sierra Nevada
range in California, which, although of
37^
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
much greater elevation, slopes gently and
is interspersed with broad valleys. It
was due rather to the forests than to the
moderate elevation of the central mountains
of Germany that their settlement was
delayed until the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. The influence of the broad,
desert tableland of the great basin in
separating the western from the Mississippi
states is greater than that of the Rocky
Mountains with peaks more than twelve
thousand feet in height. The extensive
glacial formations and the sterility of
the mountains in Scandinavia have held
Sweden and Norway asunder, and at
the same time have permitted the Lapps
and their herds of reindeer to force
themselves in between like a wedge. The
broad, elevated steppes of Central Tien-
schan enabled the Kirghese to cross the
mountains with their herds and to spread
abroad in all directions.
In such cases the natives of tablelands
and mountainous regions, who inhabit
little worlds of their own on the heights,
themselves contribute not a little towards
rendering it difficult to pass through their
countries. The most striking
,J ,/ *t. example of this is Central
Worlds on the . • it- .l j-
„ . . Asia with its nomadic races,
whose influence in separating
the great coast-nations of the east, west, and
south from one another has been far more
potent than that of the land itself. And
these nomads are a direct product of the
climate and the soil of this greatest plateau
in the world. The dry tablelands of North
America, from the Sierra Madre in
Mexico to Atacama in the south, were in
early times inhabited by closely related
races, having more or less similar institu-
tions and customs. A like effect of life on
plateaus, shown in the Caucasus Moun-
tains, that have preserved their character
as a barrier against both Romans and
Persians, and have been crossed by the
Russians only in recent times, points to a
further reason for the sundering influence
of the wall-like position of mountains
between the steppes and the sea. Phe-
nomena similar to those observed in
Central Asia and in North America occur
on a smaller scale in every mountainous
country — extensive uninhabited table-
lands in which man and free nature
come into direct contact with each other.
Independent development is thus assured
to the dwellers on mountains, and to their
states a preponderance of territory over
372
population. The political importance of
Switzerland is not owing to its three
millions of inhabitants, but to the impos-
sibility of occupying one-fourth of the
Alps. The position — almost that of a
Great Power^held by Switzerland during
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was
due to the union of this element of
. strength (and the fact that
-, ^^ y^ ... Switzerland, by reason of its
Touch with ., , ■ ■ 1 J r - 1
^, , situation, includes many of the
Nature , • ' , , -^ ■ ,
most important commercial
routes in Europe) with the mountain-bred
spirit of liberty and independence of its
people. In other respects, too, mountain
states stand pre-eminent among nations —
as Tyrol outshone all other Austrian pro-
vinces in i8og, so the mountain tribes of
the Caucasus were the only Asiatics able
to offer any permanent resistance to the
advance of the Russians. The broad,
rough character of a highland country is
an active force ; in all mountain wars it
has led to the spreading out of armies and
to the lengthening of columns.
The support afforded by mountains to
weak nations that without the protection
of a great uninhabited region would not
have been able to maintain their inde-
pendence can be likened only to the pro-
tection which, as we have seen, is given
by the sea. Switzerland has often been
compared to the Low Countries ; and
there is even a still greater resemblance
between city cantons such as Basle and
Geneva and ports like Hamburg and
Liibeck. It was owing to similar reasons
that the strongholds of French Protes-
tantism during the sixteenth century were
the Cevennes, Berne, and La Rochelle.
The protection given by mountains must
not be looked upon as of an entirely
passive nature, for the rugged nature of
mountaineers, and their concentration
within small areas where a development is
possible, rendering them conscious of inde-
pendence and assisting them to preserve it,
are also a result of life in
the highlands. In low-lying
Mountains the
Friends of
Weak Nations
countries difference in levels
cannot exceed a thousand
feet ; and, as the variations in conformation
are correspondingly small, the lowlands
offer fewer hindrances to historical move-
ments than do rivers, seas, and marshes —
thus there is a greater opportunity for the
development of such movements upon the
plains. Consequently there is a rapid diffu-
sion of races over extensive regions whose
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF NATIONS
boundaries are determined by area rather
than by conformation.
Lowlands hasten historical movements.
There is no trace of the retarding and
protecting effects of the highlands in
lands where, as Labu said of Saxony, a
nation dwells together with its enemies
on the same boundless level. Nomadism
is the form of civilisation
Effect of characteristic of broad plains
Mountams ^^^ extensive tablelands. But
on People ^^^ Germanic races of history, a
great part of which were no longer nomads,
exhibited a hastening in their movement
towards the west when they reached the
lowlands ; for they appeared on the lower
Rhine at an earlier time than on the upper
Rhine, delayed in their wanderings to-
wards the latter by the mountainous,
broken routes. Long after the Celts had
disappeared from the lowlands, when their
memory only was preserved in the names
of hills and rivers, they still continued to
exist in the protected mountain regions of
Bohemia. In like manner, in later times,
the Slavs maintained themselves in natural
strongholds after they had vanished from
the plains of Northern Germany. Com-
pare the conquest of Siberia, accomplished
in a century, with the endless struggles
in the Caucasus. And what lowland
country can show remnants of people
equivalent to those of the Caucasus ?
The lowlands are also regions of the most
extensive mingling of races. We have
but to think of Siberia or the Sudan.
In the development of states, lowlands
take precedence over mountainous dis-
trict. Rome expanded from the sea-coast
to the Apennines, and from the valley
of the Po to the Alps ; the conquest of
Iberia began in the one great plain of the
peninsula, in Andalusia, and in the low-
lands of the Ebro ; and foreign control
of Britain ended at the mountains of
Scotland and Wales. In North America
colonisation spread out in broad belts at
the foot of the Alleghanies
The Natural before it penetrated into the
Strongholds of j^o^ntains. In Southern
Nomad Races ^j^.^^ ^^^ mountains with
their unsubdued tribes are like political
islands in the midst of the Mongolised hills
and plains.
The lesser the differences in level, and
the smaller the conformations of the
earth, the more important are those
differences that remain within heights of
less than a thousand feet above the sea.
Elevations of a dozen yards were of the
greatest importance on the battlefields of
Leipzig, Waterloo, and Metz. The signifi-
cance of the little rise in the land of
Gavre, near Ghent, lies in the fact that
even at times of flood a foundation for a
bridge will remain firm upon it. The
slightest elevation in the lowland cities of
Germany and Russia offers such a contrast
in altitude to its surroundings that a
fortress, a cathedral, or a kremlin is
erected upon it. The two ridges that
extend through the plains of North
Germany are not only very prominent in
the landscape, but also in history. Owing
to their thick forests, their lakes and
marshes, and small populations, they are
peculiarly like barriers ; and the breaches
in them are of importance to the geo-
graphy both of war and of commerce.
The battles fought against Sweden and
Poland, round about the points where the
Oder and the Vistula cross these regions,
are to be counted among the most decisive
struggles in the history of Prussia.
Wherever there are no differences in
level, a substitute is sought in water.
In such cases wide rivers or
numerous lakes and marshes
form the most effective
obstacles, boundaries, and
strongholds. Finally the plains approach
the sea and are submerged by it ; and here
lowland countries find a support safer than
that of the mountains, and richer in piolitical
results. North Germany is supported by
the sea ; South Germany by mountains.
Which boundary is the more definite, the
more capable of development, politically
and economically ? Political superiority
is ever connected with the protection and
support of the sea.
The influences of vegetation upon
historical movements are often more
important than those of the earth-
formation itself. Wherever extensive
lowland regions are overgrown with grass,
we always find mobile nomadic races that,
with their large herds and warlike organi-
sations, are great causes of disturbance in
the development of neighbouring lands.
Since the form of vegetable growth
which covers grass steppes and prairies
is dependent on climate, it follows that
nomadism is prevalent throughout the
entire northern sub-temperate zone,
where such grass is abundant — from the
western border of Sahara to Gobi.
Nomadic races of historical significance
373
Nature
at
Waterloo
"*'^S(*J-
NOMADIC PEOPLES OF THE NEW WORLD
Wherever there are vast lowland countries covered with grass, nomadic peoples are found moving
from place to place with their herds. There are many such peoples in the Old World and a few m
the New World, notable among the latter bemg the Gauchos of the Pampas, types of whom are here seen.
are even to be seen in the New World —
for example, the Gauchos of the Pampas,
and the Llaneros of Venezuela.
In comparison with plains and prairies,
forests are decided hindrances to his-
torical movements. Peoples are separated
from one another by strips of woodland ;
the state and the civilisation of the Incas
ceased at the fringe of primeval forest of
the east Andes. Thickly-wooded moun-
tains present the most pronounced diffi-
culties to historical movements. The
appearance of the oldest large states and
centres of culture on the borders of
steppes, in the naturally thinly-wooded
districts at the mouths of rivers, and on
diluvial plains, seems natural enough to
us when we think of the difhculties pre-
sented by life in a forest glade to men
who had only stone implements and fire
at their command.
A description of the difficulties encoun-
tered during Stanley's one hundred and
fifty-seven days' journey through the
primeval woods of Central Africa gives us
a very clear conception of what are
termed " hindrances " to historical move-
ments. The early history of Sweden has
been characterised as a struggle with the
forest ; and this description is valid for
every forest country. The forest divides
nations from each other ; it allows only
small tribes to unite, and creates but small
states, or, at the most, loosely bound
confederations. It is only where a great
river system forms natural roads, as in
the regions of the Amazon and the Congo,
that great forest districts ma}' be rapidly
united to form a state. In other cases
settlements in forest clearings and road-
breaking precede p)olitical control.
In this way the Chinese conquered the
races of the western half of Formosa in two
hundred years ; in the eastern half the
land is still under forest and the natives
have also retained their independence.
The existence of small states, with their
many obstacles to political and economic
growth, still continues in forest regions
alone ; and the roaming hordes of hunters
inhabiting them belong to the simplest
forms of human societies.
376
o
THE MAKING
OF THE
NATIONS— II
Professor
FREDERICK
RATZEL
LAND AND WATER AND THE GREATNESS
OF PEOPLES
CINXE man is a creature capable only of
*^ life on land, bodies of water must at
one time have been the greatest obstacles
to his diffusion. Thus the original family of
human beings could have inhabited only
one portion of the earth, to which it was
restricted by impassable barriers of water.
We know that in early geological times the
division of the earth's surface into land
and water was subject to the same general
laws as to-day ; therefore such a portion
of the earth could not have been more
than a part of the total land in existence —
a larger or smaller world-island.
The first step beyond the bounds of
this island was the first step towards the
conquest of the whole earth by man. The
first raft was therefore the most important
contrivance that man could have invented.
It not only signified the beginning of
the acquisition of all parts of the earth
to their very farthest limits, but also —
and this is far more important — the poten-
_ , ., , tiality for all possibilities of
Early Man Si- -^ j ±
f5r*«f^«f divergence and temporary
separation offered by our planet.
It brought with it escape from
the development that always turns back
upon itself, travelling in a circle, and the
progress that constantly consumes itself —
factors inseparable from life confined within
a small area ; it led to the creation of
fruitful contrasts and differences, and to
wholesome competition — in short, to the
beginning of the evolution of races and
peoples. Looked at from this point of
view, even the discovery of Prometheus
has been of less moment to the progress
of mankind than that of the inventor who
first joined logs together into a raft and
set out on a voyage of discovery to the
nearest islet.
From the time of this first step onward,
the development of the human race was
so intimiately connected with the unin-
habitable water that one of its most
powerful incentives lay in the struggle
with the sea. And so little have we
advanced from this condition that the
stoutest race of the present day is one that
Greatest
Invention
from a narrow island commands the
ocean. England's strength is a proof of
the tremendous importance of the sea as
a factor of political power and of civilisa-
tion. But not to exaggerate the signifi-
cance of the ocean, we may at the same
^ time remember that it consists
c ^. * in the fact that, by means of
Sea IS ,, u- u
J the sea, ojien highways are
mp r an presented from land to land.
Command of the sea is a source of great-
ness to nations, for it facilitates dominion
over the land.
By reason of its consistency the water
is an important agent of levelling and
equalising effects. As we perceive this in
Nature, so do we also in history. A race
familiar with the sea in one place is fami-
liar with it in all regions. The Normans
off the coast of Finland, and the Spaniards
in the Pacific, found the same green,
surging element, moved by the same tides,
subject to the same laws. The ocean has
an equalising effect upon the coasts even ;
the dunes of Agadir and of the harbour
at Vera Cruz awaken memories of home
in the mind of the sailor from Hela. The
diffusion of the sea over three-quarters of
the earth's surface must also be taken into
account. Thus the influence of the ocean
in rendering men familiar with different
parts of the world is far greater than that
of the land. From the ocean comes a
constant unifying influence which ever
tends to reduce the disuniting effect of
the separation of land from land. As yet
no attempt to extend boundaries beyond
the land out over the sea has been followed
by lasting success.
No nation can or ever will possess the
sea. Carthage and Tarentum wished to
VT KT .• forbid Italian vessels the pas-
No Nation X xu T ■ ■ u
_ sage of the Laciman capes by
can Possess . ^ . .1 \r . • i • j
. g treaty ; the Venetians desired
dominion over the Adriatic to
be granted them by the Pope ; Denmark
and Sweden strove for a dominion over
the Baltic Sea ; but all this is against the
very nature of the sea ; it is one and
indivisible. Only near by the coast, within
377
History of the world
The Se&'s
Unifying
Influence
the three-mile Hmit of international law,
and in landlocked bays, may it be ruled
as land is ruled. The claims of the
Americans concerning the sovereignty of
Behring Sea have never been recognised,
and England can retain dominion over the
Irish Sea only by means of her naval
power. The ocean has a unifying influence
on the land, even when this
influence consists only in the
same ends to be attained being
placed before different nations.
During a time of the greatest disunion,
German cities that lay far enough from
one another were united by Baltic interests.
The union of scattered land-forces pre-
pared the way for the opening up of
wider horizons to England in the sixteenth
century in the same manner as for Italy
and Germany in the nineteenth.
/
gain from piracy that lures men forth,
many a ship has returned to port bearing
with it inestimable benefits to mankind ;
for the greatest maritime discoveries have
not been mere explorations of new seas,
but of new lands and peoples. Such
discoveries as these have contributed most
to the broadening of the historical horizon.
Even political questions expand, assume
a larger character, and often become less
acute, when they emerge from the narrow
limits of continental constraint upon the
free and open coasts. This is true even of
the Eastern Question, to the solution of
which definite steps were taken upon
the Mediterranean when it seemed to
have come to a deadlock in the Balkan
peninsula.
The ocean is no passive element to
maritime races. By deriving power from
/
THE LITTLE ISLAND THAT RULES THE SEA
The command of the sea is the source of national greatness, as it facilitates dominion over land. England
from a narrow island dominates the sea. The tiny part of white in the Eastern Hemisphere on this page shows
how relatively insignificant Great Britain is to the vast world of waters where her shipping is supreme
Sea power is far more closely connected
with traffic than is land power ; in fact,
the foundation of sea power is trade and
commerce. It is, however, more than
mere commercial power and monopoly
of trade. In spite of all egoism, greed,
and violence there remains one great
characteristic peculiar to maritime Powers,
spared even by Punic faith and Venetian
covetousness. Even the neighbourhood
of the ocean is characterised by its vast
natural features ; rivers broaden as they
approach the sea, great bays lie within the
coasts, and, though the latter may be
flat, the horizon lines of their low dune
landscapes are broad. The horizons of
maritime races are also broad. Whether it
be the hope of profit from commerce or of
378
the sea they become subject to the sea.
The more strength they draw from the
ocean, the less firm becomes their footing
upon the land. Finally, their power no
longer remains rooted in the land, but
grows to resemble that of a fleet resting
upon the waves ; it may with but small
expenditure of effort extend
its influence over an enor-
mously wide area, but it may
also be swept away by the first
storm. As yet all maritime nations have
been short-lived ; their rise has been
swift, often surprisingly so ; but they have
never remained long at the zenith of pros-
perity, and, as a rule, their decay has been
as rapid as their elevation to power. The
cause of the fall of all maritime nations
Short-lived
Nations
of the Sea
MANS FIRST STEP TOWARDS THE CONQUEST OF THE EARTH
The most momentous event in the early history of man was the launching of the first raft. That moment
was instinct with all the mighty conquests and discoveries yet to be accomplished over seas ; and even the
discovery of fire, says Professor Ratzel, has been of less moment to the progress of mankind than that of the
inventor who first jomed logs together into a raft and set out on a voyage of discovery to the nearest islet
379
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
has been the smallness of their basis,
their foreign possessions, widely separated
from one another and difficult to defend,
and their dependence upon these foreign
possessions. In many cases the over-
balancing of political by economic interests,
the neglect of materials for defence, and
effeminacy resulting from commercial
prosperity, have also con-
Thc Fall tributed to their destruction.
of Maritime ^^^^^^^ combinations of
Nations characteristics arising from
the geographical positions of oceans,
continents, and islands are connected
with the broad features common to
oceanic continuity. These characteristics
are reflected from the sea back to the
land, and there give rise to historical
groups. The historical significance of such
groups is expressed in their names even —
RIediterranean World, Baltic Nations,
Atlantic Powers, and Pacific Sphere of
Civilisation. They are primarily the results
of commerce and exchange, and of the
furthering, correlating influences of all
coasts and islands. When they united all
peninsulas, islands, and coasts of the
Mediterranean into one state the Romans
merely set a political crown upon the
civiUsed community that had developed
round about, and by means of, this sea.
And if we wish rightly to estimate
the significance of Roman expansion from
a Central European point of view, we may
express our conception very shortly —
the diffusion of Mediterranean culture over
Western and Central Europe. It was at the
same time a widening of the horizon of a
landlocked sea to that of the open ocean.
The Atlantic Ocean succeeded to the
Mediterranean Sea. The Americans and
the Russians, and the Japanese, repeating
their words, maintain that in the same
manner the Pacific must succeed to the
Atlantic ; but they forget the peculiar
features of the Mediterranean, especially
its conditions of area. It is no more prob-
. able that such a compact,
niqueness isolated development will
^, .., occur again than that the
Mediterranean, . , r a . i n
history oi Athens will repeat
itself on the Korean peninsula or at
Shantung. The greater the ocean, the
farther is it removed from the isolated
sea. It was not the Atlantic that
succeeded to the Mediterranean, but the
broad world-ocean that succeeded to the
narrow basin called the Mediterranean Sea.
There have always been differences
380
between the various divisions of the main
sea ; and these variations will ever con-
tinue to be prominent, although constantly
tending to become less and less so.
The Pacific will always remain by far the
greatest ocean, including, as it does, forty-
five per cent, of the total area of water.
Owing to its great breadth, the Pacific
routes are from three to four times as long
as those of the Atlantic. The Pacific
widens toward the south ; and Australia
and Oceania lie in the opening, thus
furnishing the Pacific with its most
striking peculiarity — a third continent
situated in the Southern Hemisphere, to-
gether with the richest series of island
formations on earth. Whatever the Pacific
may contribute to history, it will be a
contribution to the annals of the Southern
Hemisphere ; and if a great independent
history develop in the antipodes, it
will have the Southern Pacific, bounded
by Australia, South America, New
Zealand, and Oceania, for its sphere
of action. The area of the Atlantic
Ocean is but half that of the Pacific.
Nor is it for this reason alone that in com-
parison with the latter it is
n f ^.*^.-.- an inland rather than a world
Potentialities r • . •.
f th P 'f ^^^ ' ' owing to its narrow-
ness between the Old and the
New Worlds, the branches it puts forth, and
the islands and peninsulas that it touches,
it shortens the routes from one coast to
the other. In it there is more of a merging
of land and sea than a separation ; and
to-day it is chiefly a European- American
ocean. The Indian Ocean is both geo-
graphically and historically but half an
ocean. Even though important parts of
it may be situated north of the equator,
it is too much enclosed to the north ;
it widens to the south, and thus belongs
to the Southern Hemisphere.
The great oceans open up broad areas
for historical movements, and through
their instrumentality peoples are enabled
to spread from coast to coast in all direc-
tions ; the inland seas, on the contrary,
cause the political life of the nations
bordering upon them to be concentrated
within a limited area. The Mediterranean
will ever remain a focus towards which the
interests of almost all European Powers
concentrate. It has, moreover, become
one of the world's highways since the
completion of the Suez Canal. The Baltic
somewhat resembles the Mediterranean ,
but it would be saying too much to look
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
The Coast
the Threshold
of the Land
upon its position as other than subordinate
to that of the greater sea. The area of the
Baltic is but one-seventh that of the
Mediterranean ; and it is lacking in the
unique intercontinental situation of the
latter. In many respects it resembles the
Black Sea rather than the Mediterranean,
especially by reason of its eastern relations.
Originally the coast was the
threshold of the sea ; but as
soon as maritime races deve-
loped it became the threshold
of the land. In addition it is a margin, a
fringe in which the peculiarities of sea and
land are combined ; and for this very reason
sea-coasts have a historical value greatly
disproportionate to their area, especially
as they constitute the best of all bound-
aries for the nations that possess them.
Here harbours are situated, fortresses,
and the most densely populated of cities.
Owing to their close connection with the
sea, the inhabitants of coasts acquire
characteristics which distinguish them
from all other peoples. Even if of the same
nationality as their inland neighbours —
as, for example, the Greeks of Thrace and
of Asia Minor and the Malays of many of
the East Indian islands — their foreign
traffic nevertheless impresses certain traits
and features upon them which in the case
of the Low Countries led almost to political
disruption.
A coast is more favoured than an
interior in all things relating to commerce
and traffic ; yet neither may enjoy per-
manent life alone without the other. The
French departments of the Weser and of
the Elbe were among the most ephemeral
of the political results achieved by the
short-lived Napoleonic era. With the sea
at their backs it is easy for the inhabitants
of a coast to become detached from their
nation, and but a simple matter for them
to spread over other coasts. Ever since
the time of the Phoenicians there have
been numerous colonists of coasts and
. . founders of coast states. The
*V^^ 1 Normans are most typical in
and Dead t- i, .l t-l
^ European history. 1 he expan-
sion of coast colonies towards
the interior is one of the most striking
features of recent African development.
Thus coasts are to be looked at from within
as well as from without. To many
races — such as Hottentots and Austra-
lians— the coast is dead compared with
the interior ; for Germany the coast has
been politically dead for centuries. A
382
river-mouth is best suited to carrying
the influences of the coast inland.
All ancient historians supposed that
the Mediterranean Sea, with its many
bays, peninsulas, and islands, schooled the
Phoenicians in seamanship. This, however,
is not so. Nautical skill is transmitted from
one people to another, as may be seen
from some of the most obvious cases in
modern history. No maritime people has
become great through its own coast alone.
It is not the coast of Maine, with its numer-
ous inlets and bays, that has produced
the best seamen, but the coast of
Massachusetts, naturally unfavourable for
the most part ; and it has produced the
best seamen for the reason that the
inland districts bounded by it are far more
productive and furthering to commerce
than are the interior regions of Maine.
Nature has forced races to take to the
sea only in such countries as Norway and
Greece, where the strips of coast are
narrow and the inland territory poor.
In order to have political influence it is
sufficient to have one foot on the sea-
coast. Aigues-Mortes, with its swampy
PI environment, was sufficient to
The Place g^tend France to the Mediter-
01 the Coast j • j.i, jr
. „. ranean durmg the reign of
IS ory g^^ Louis ; Fiume sufficed for
Hungary. Forbidding desert coasts have
had a peculiarly retarding effect on his-
torical development. It was necessary to
rediscover the Australian mainland, to
touch at more favourable points, one
hundred and thirty years after the time
of Tasman ; thus the history of the settle-
ment of Australia by Europeans originated,
not with him, but with Cook.
As portions of the general water area,
rivers are branches or runners of the
sea, extending into the land — lymphatic
vessels, as it were, bearing nourishment to
the ocean from the higher regions of the
earth. Therefore they form the natural
routes followed by historical movements
from the sea inland and vice versa. A solid
foundation of truth underlies those rivers
of legendary geography that joined one
sea with another. The connection of the
Baltic and the Black Sea via Kieff is not
that described by Adam of Bremen ; but
Russian canals have estabhshed a water-
way, following out the plan indicated by
Nature, just as the Varangians also realised
it in a ruder way by dragging their
boats from the Dwina to the Dnieper. By
uniting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi
^^vo h^^
■•<'O0.0()0 **
^ /
THE OCEANS OF THE WORLD
This map, on a projection used by mariners, , ^, ^
shows the relative sizes of the great ^ t'
oceans, viewed from above. The natural ^ "7^ ^r «.
advantage of the position of the British s '<r '•fj^ fl^cj^
Isles for communicating with the oceans \ *(9^ 'C oct^^r^
highways is clearly seen, and the vast \ ■®<'0.s<,M«'** "
area of the Pacific is strikingly indicated. \,^ ^
by means of ihe Illinois River, the French
provided a waterway from the North
Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, a
line of power in the rear of the Atlantic
colonies. The latter fell back on salt water,
the former on fresh. The Nile, flowing
parallel to the Red Sea from Tanasee in
the Abyssinian highlands, shares with the
Red Sea even to-day in the traffic
between Eastern and East-central Africa.
The railway from Mombasa to Uganda
completes a western Mediterranean-Indian
line of connection, as a road along the
Euphrates to the Persian Gulf would
an eastern, each following the direction
of rivers running parallel to the Red Sea.
We can clearly see the transition of the
functions of oceans to fresh, shallow water,
to sounds and lagoons, in which sea traffic
is furnished with smoother, quieter routes
under the shelter of the coasts.
In truth, only portions of the lines of
traffic follow rivers ; for rivers flow from
highland to lowland, watersheds breaking
their course here and there. In comparison
with the oceans, rivers are but shallow
383
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
channels, the continuity of which may be
broken by every rocky ledge. Thus different
regions for traffic arise at various points
in the same stream. Only that part of
Egypt which is situated north of the first
cataract is Egypt proper ; the territory
to the south was conquered from Nubia.
The farther we travel up a stream the less
water and the more rapids and falls we
shall find ; therefore traffic also decreases
in the direction toward the river's source.
It may be seen from this that there is but
little proba- __ „
biUty of truth [
in the analogy i
drawn between :
the flowing of ;
rivers from
elevations to
plains and
the migrations
of nations and
directions in
which states
expand. His-
tory shows
that migration
and develop-
ment follow a
direction con-
trary from that
in which rivers
flow.
Maritime and
terrestrial ad-
vantages arc
concentra-
ted where ;i
river joins the
sea ; esj)ecJall\-
charactei-
istic of sucli
districts arc
deltas, at an
early date
rendered more
efficient for
purposes of
commerce
through canals and dredging. The fertihty
of the alluvial soil, the lack of forest
occasioned by frequent floods, and the
protection afforded by the islands of the
delta, may have had not a little in-
fluence on the choice of such regions as
settlements for man. At all events,
estuaries and deltas, both small and great,
were in the earliest times centres of civilisa-
tio.i. Egypt and Babylonia both testify
384
THE ORIGIN OF SEAFARING PEOPLES
It is not sufficient to have a favourable sea-coast in order to breed a race of
sea-going people. The land behind the coast-line must be fertile and produc-
tive, else no inducement exists for seafaring. This condition is everywhere
present along the British shores, of which this is a typical coasting scene.
to this ; the colonising Greeks also showed
a preference for river mouths. Miletus,
Ephesus and Rome were states situated
at the mouths of rivers, and so were
the ancient settlements on the Rhone, the
Guadalquivir, and the Indus. It would
not be possible, however, to deduce from
this proofs of a potamic phase of civihsa-
tion and formation of nations preceding
the Thalassic, or Mediterranean. Estuary
and delta states are far more a result of
the Mediterranean culture. The latter led
to the settle-
__,, . „ - -^ ^^^^^ ^^ favour-
' able districts
; on various
coasts, all of
I which were
finally swal-
lowed up" into
the Roman
Empire during
the period of
its northern
and eastern
expansion.
Another
much more
evident process
of development
through the
instrumen-
tality of rivers
was shown at
the time when
traffic began to
extend itself
o \' e r wide
areas. Rivers
are the natural
liighways in
countries
which abound
in water, and
are of so much
the greater
importance be-
cause in such
lands other
thoroughfares are frequently wanting.
Taken collectively, rivers form a natural
circulatory system. In America at the
time of the exploration and conquest, in
Siberia, in Africa to-day, they are natural
arteries by means of which exchange and
political power may be extended. The
more accessible a river is to commerce, the
more rapidly political occupation increases
about its basin, as has been shown by the
THE JUNCTIONS OF GREAT RIVERS ARE LANDMARKS OF HISTORY
Where two rivers join, two lines of political tendencies always meet, and their junction is the point whence political forces
must be controlled. This is the significance of the situations of Mainz (i at top), Khartoum (i), Lyons (3), and Belgrade (4)
Photos ' Frilh and }'liotochi ome
^5 3'^5
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Varangians in Russia and the Portuguese
in Brazil. The best example of a country
having developed through conformity with
a natural river system and in connection
with it is that of the Congo State, with
part of its boundaries drawn
ivers as simply along the lines of water-
ig y'^y* ° c;]^g(^s Mastery among rival
Development , j ^ • j ? iu
colonies is determined by the
results of the struggle for the possession of
rivers ; this has been as clearly shown by
the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi in
America, as by the Niger and the Benuwe
in Africa. The influence of riverways in
furthering the path of political develop-
ment may be best seen in the contrast
between South America and Africa ; the
colonising movement came to the latter
more than 300 years later than to the
former continent.
Every river is a route followed by
political power, and is therefore at the
same time a point of attraction and
line of direction. The Germans have
pushed their way along the Elbe between
the Danes and the Slavs, and along the
Vistula between the Slavs and the Lithu-
anians or old Prussians. The river that
supports an embryonic nation holds it
together when developed. The influence of
the Mississippi was directed against the
outbreak of the Civil War in America. As
pearls are strung along a cord, so the pro-
vinces of new and old Egypt are connected
liy the Nile. Austria-Hungary is not the
Danube nation only because the river was
the life nerve of its development, but also
because eighty-two per cent, of Austro-
Hungarian territory is included within
the regions drained by it. When the
natural connection of rivers is broken then
this power of cohesion ceases. The political
and economic disunion of the Rhine, the
Main, and other German rivers preceded
the dissolution of the German Empire.
Where two rivers join there is always a
meeting of two lines of political ten-
dencies, and the place of their
-''^ ^ ^ junction is the point whence
- p*^ the political forces must be con-
trolled and held together. This
is the significance of the situations of
Mainz, Lyons, Belgrade, St. Louis, and
Khartoum. The course followed by flow-
ing water is far less direct than that of
historical movements ; the latter take the
shortest way, and do not continue along
the stream where a loop is formed ; or
they may follow a tributary that runs on
in the original direction of the main stream,
as in the case of the very ancient highway
along the Oder and the Neisse to Bohemia.
The sides of sharp angles formed by a
river in its course lead to a salient point as,
Regensburg and Orleans. A tributary
meeting the main stream at this point
forms the best route to a neighbouring
river, or the angle may become a penin-
sula, so bounded by a tributary stream at
its base as almost to take the form of an
island.
Breaks in the continuity of the land
occasioned by rivers are caused rather by
the channel in which the water flows than
by the river itself. Thus we often find
that dry river-beds are effective agents of
this dividing up of the land. Permanent
inequalities of the earth's surface are in-
tensified by flowing water. Therefore a river
system separates the land into natural
divisions. These narrow clefts are ever
willingly adopted as boundary lines,
especially in cases where it is
*^Jf f*. , necessary to set general limits
as Dividers , ^ • j. .t^ t-u
- to an extensive territory, 1 hus
Charles the Great bounded his
empire by the Eider, Elbe, Raab, and
Ebro. Smaller divisions of land are formed
by the convergence of tributaries and main
streams, and again still smaller portions
are created by the joining together of the
lesser branches of tributaries, these taking
an especially important place in the
history of wars : for example, those formed
by the Rhine, Weser, Elbe, and Oder, and
on a lesser scale by the Moselle, Seille,
and Saar. Fords are always important ;
in Africa they have even been points at
which small states have begun to develop.
Rivers as highways in time of war no
longer have the value once attributed to
them by Frederick the Great, who called
the Oder " the nurse of the army." Yet
rivers were of such great moment in this
respect in the roadless interior of America
during the Civil War that the getting of
information as to water-levels was one of
the most important tasks of the army
intelligence department. Rivers will always
remain superior to railways as lines of com-
munication during time of war, at least in
one respect, for they cannot be destroyed.
386
THEMAKING
OF THE
NATIONS-m
r^V, :^\
Professor
FREDERICK
RATZEL
THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT IN THE
LIFE OF NATIONS
I TPON the earth, with its varied con-
^ figuration and formation of land and
sea, are many kinds of hindrances and
Hmits to hfc.
The most obvious effect of natural
region and natural boundary lies in the
counteracting forces opposed by the
earth through them to a formless and
unlimited diffusion of life. Isolated terri-
tory furthers political independence, which,
indeed, is of itself isolation. The develop-
ment of a nation upon a fixed territory
consists in a striving to make use of all
the natural advantages of that territory.
The superiority of a naturally isolated
region lies in the fact that seclusion itself
brings with it the greatest of all advan-
tages. Hence the precocious economic
and political development of races that
dwell on islands or on peninsulas, in moun-
tain valleys and on island-like deltas.
Often enough gx'owth that originates
under such favourable conditions leads to
ruin. A young nation deems
itself possessed of all so long
as it has the isolation that
ensures independence ; it
sees too late that the latter has been pur-
chased at the price of a suffocating lack of
space ; and it dies of a hypertrophy of
development — a death common to minor
states. This was the cause of the swift rise
and decline of Athens and of Venice, and
of all powers that restricted themselves
to islands and to narrow strips of coast.
The more natural boundaries a state
possesses, the more definite are the
poHtical questions raised by its develop-
ment. The consohdation of England,
Scotland, and Wales was simjile and
obvious, as patent as if it had been decreed
beforehand, as was also the expansion of
France over the region that lies between
the Alps and the Pyrenees, the Mediter-
ranean and the Atlantic Ocean. On the
other hand, what a fumbling, groping
development was that of Germany, with
her lack of natural boundary in the east !
Thus in the great geographical features
of lands lie pre-ordained movements,
The Rise and
Death of
Isolated States
constrained by the highest necessity — a
higher necessity in the case of some than
of others. The frontier of the Pyrenees
was more necessary to France than that
of the Rhine ; an advance to the Indian
Ocean is more necessary to Russia than a
movement into Central Europe,
a ura Growth is soundest when a
Boundaries . , , . r-n ,
. „ state expands so as to fill out
a naturally bounded region —
as, for example, the United States, that
symmetrically occupy the southern half
of the continent of North America, or
Switzerland, extending to the Rhme and
Lake of Constance. There are often ad-
justments of frontiers which force the
territory of a nation back into a natural
region, as shown in the case of Chili,
which gave up the attempt to extend its
boundaries beyond the Andes, in spite of
its having authorisation to do so, founded
on the right of discovery, the original
Spanish division of provinces, and wars of
independence. A favourable external form
is often coincident with a favourable
internal configuration which is quite as
furthering to internal continuity as is the
external form to isolated development.
The Roman Empire, externally uniform
as an empire of Mediterranean states, was
particularly qualified for holding fast to its
most distant provinces, by reason of the
Mediterranean Sea that occupied its very
centre. Everything that furthers traffic is
also favourable to cohesion. Hence the sig-
nificance of waterways for ancient states,
and of canals and railways for modern
nations. Egypt was the empire of the
Nile, and the Rhine was at one time the
life-vein of the empire of Charles the Great.
A state does not always
A State must remain fixed *in the same
Forsake .ts „^^^„,.^^i :^^^ However ad-
Boundaries ^ ^u u
vantageous they may have
been, it must, on increasing, forsake the best
of boundaries. Since one region is exchanged
for another, the law of increasing areas
comes into force. Every land, sea, river
region, or valley should always be conceived
of as an area that must be discovered,
Z^7
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
inhabited, and politically realised before it
may exert any influence beyond its limits.
Thus the Mediterranean district had first
to complete its internal development
before it could produce any external effect.
This internal development first took
possession of the small territories, and,
mastering them, turned to the greater.
Thus we may see history pro-
gress from clearings in forests,
oases, islands, small peninsulas,
such as Greece ; and strips of
coast, to great peninsulas, such as Italy ;
isthmian situations of continental size,
such as Gaul ; only to come to a halt in
half continents such as the United States
and Canada, and continents. Europe —
next to the smallest continent — has had
the richest history of all, but with the
greatest breaking up of its area into small
First
Continent
State
geography, it is by no means to be neglected
by those who are interested in history,
boundary questions being among the most
frequent causes of wars. In addition,
boundaries are the necessary result of
historical movements. In case two states
strive against each other in expanding,
the motion of both is impeded, and the
boundary lies where the movement comes
to a halt. It is in the nature of things
that growing states are very frequently
contiguous to uninhabited regions, not to
other states. This contiguity is always
a source of natural boundaries. The most
natural of all arise from adjacency to un-
inhabitable regions : first the uninhabitable
lands, then the sea. The boundary at the
edge of the uninhabitable world is the
safest ; for there is nothing beyond. The
broad Arctic frontiers of Russia are a
THE HOTTEST PLACE IN THE WORLD IS INHABITED BY MAN
No climate has triumphed over the endurance of man. Massowah, the most important town in the Italian Colony
of Eritrea, in North Africa, is the hottest place in the world, but, like the coldest known place, it is inhabitecf.
divisions ; Australia, the smallest continent,
is the earliest to unite its parts into a
continental state. Development expends
all its power in bringing the areas of the
three greatest land-divisions into play,
and in opposing their one hundred and
five million square miles to the ten and
a half million of the smaller divisions ;
their economic action is already felt to a
considerable degree. Thus there arises
an alternation of isolation and expansion,
which was clearly shown in the history of
Rome, whose territory grew from the single
city, out over the valley of the Tiber, into
Apennine Italy, into the peninsula, across
the islands and peninsulas of the Medi-
terranean, and finally into the two adja-
cent continents.
The boundaries of natural regions are
always natural boundaries. Although
this delicate subject may l:e left to political
388
great source of power. A high mountain
range, also, may separate inhabited re-
gions— which are always State territory —
by an uninhabited strip of land. After
all, the sea, marshes, rivers even, are
uninhabitable zones. But trafiic brings
connection with it, and the Rhine, which
to the Romans was a moat, especially well
adapted as a defence, is now,
'I'L^^.- 1 with its thirty railway bridges
and National j ^.u j r i i
_ . and thousands of vessels ply-
mg up and down and across,
far more of a highway and a means of
communication than a dividing line.
The position, form, and movements of
the earth seem far enough removed from
the deeds and destinies of peoples, yet the
more we contemplate the latter, the more
we are led to consider the earth's inclina-
tion to its axis, its approximately spherical
form, and its motion, which, combined,
HOW NATIONS ARE AFFECTED BY THEIR ENVIRONMENT
INHABITANTS OF THE COLDEST PLACE IN THE WORLD
Man is the most adaptable ot living creatures. There is no climate in the world in which he cannot live. The lowest
temperatures taken have been at Verkhoyansk, in Siberia, but the place is inhabited by people, of wbopi we give a group.
are the cause of the recurrence in fixed
order of day and night, summer and winter.
. The effects of these great earthly
phenomena are differently felt in every
country ; for they vary according to
geographical location. Practically, that
which most conforms to any given situa-
tion north or south of the equator is the
climate of a land. Day and night are of
more even length at the equator than in
our country ; but beyond the Polar circles
there are days that last for months, and
nights equally long. Scarcely any annual
variation in temperature is known to the
inhabitants of Java, while in Eastern
Siberia Januarys of fifty degrees below
freezing-point and Julys of twenty de-
grees above zero of Centigrade, winters
during which the mercury freezes, and
summers of oppressive sultriness, are con-
trasted with one another.
In our temperate region there is rain, as a
rule, during all months, but as far north
as Italy and Greece the year is divided
into a dry and a wet season. Great effects
are produced over the entire earth
and upon all living creatures by the
thus conditioned climatic differences.
They must be considered at the very
beginning of every investigation into
history. Since we know that a fluctua-
ting distribution of heat is caused by
the 23i° inclination of the earth's
axis, investigation also leads us to a
knowledge of further phenomena, to a
consideration of the dependence of the
mmur
MANS TRIUMPH OVER CLIMATE : THE COLDEST PLACE IN THE WORLD
Just as man has estabhshed himself in the torrid heat of Massowah, so he can endure the highest degree of cold.
The coldest place in the world, Verkhoyansk, of which this is a photograph, is the capital of a Siberian province.
389
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
The First
Question about
a Country
winds and of the precipitation of heat
upon this very same condition.
And thus we come into contact with the
thousand connecting threads by which
man's economic activity, health, distri-
bution over the earth, even his spiritual
and his political hfe, are inseparably
bound up with the chmate. Hence the
first question that should be
asked concerning a country
is : What is its geographical
situation ? A land may be
interesting for many other reasons besides
nearness or remoteness from the equator ;
but that which is of the greatest interest
of aU to the historian is a consideration
of the manifold and far-reaching effects
of climate.
The study of human geography teaches
us that climate affects mankind in two
ways. First, it produces a direct effect
upon individuals, races, indeed the inhabi-
tants of entire zones, influencing their
bodily conditions, their characters, and
their minds ; in the second place, it pro-
duces an indirect effect by its influence on
conditions necessary to life. This is due
to the fact, that the plants and animals
with which man stands in so varied a
relationship, which supply him with
nourishment, clothing, and shelter, which,
when domesticated and cultivated, enter
his service, as it were, and become most
valuable and influential assistants and
instruments for his development and cul-
ture, are also dependent upon climate.
Important properties of the soil, the
existence of plains, deserts, and forests,
also depend upon climate. Effects of
chmate, both direct and indirect, are
united in pohtical-geographical pheno-
mena, and are especially manifest in the
growth of states and in their permanence
and strength.
There is no climate that cannot be
borne by man ; of all organic beings he is
one of the most capable of adapting him-
self to circumstances. Men
J*'"' *"*" dwell even in the very coldest
zi^!^^ * regions. The place where the
ima es jQ^ygg^. temperatures have been
measured, Verkhoyansk, with a mean
January temperature of - 54° F., is the
capital of a Siberian province ; and a dis-
trict where the temperature is of the very
hottest, Massowah, is the most important
town in the Italian colony of Eritrea.
However, both heat and cold, when ex-
cessive, tend to lessen population, the size
390
of settlements, arid economic activity.
The great issues of the world's history
have been decided on ground situated
between the tropic of Cancer and the Polar
circle. The question as to whether the
northern half of North America should be
English or French was decided between the
parallels of 44° and 48° north latitude ;
and in the same manner the settlement as
to whether Sweden or Russia should be
supreme in Northern Europe took place
a httle south of 60° north. Holland did
not lose and regain her Indian possessions
in the neighbourhood of the equator, but
in Europe ; and Spain fell from the high
estate of sovereign over South and Central
America because her power as a European
nation had decayed.
The coldest countries in the world are
either entirely uninhabited — as Spitz-
bergen and Franz Josef's Land — or very
thinly populated. Some are politically
without a master — the two territories just
mentioned, for example ; some are politic-
ally occupied, as is Greenland, but are of
very little value. History teaches that
traffic between such colonies and the
mother country may cease
Strange entirely without the mother
Divergence
of a Race
country suffering any loss there-
by. The hottest regions in the
world are for the most part colonies or
dependencies of European Powers. This
applies to the whole of tropical Africa,
Asia, Australia, and Oceania, and partly
to tropical America.
The exclusion of European nations from
grasping for possessions in America was
not determined upon in the compromised
territory of tropical America, but in the
United States, a short distance south of
39° north latitude. What a difference in
the parts played in history by the two
branches of the Tunguse race, the one held
in subjection in the cold latitude of Russia,
the other conquering China, and now the
sovereign power in the more temperate
climate of that country ; or between the
Turks who, as Yakuts, lead a nomadic hfe in
the Lena valley, and the Turks who govern
Western Asia ! Latham called the region
extending from the Elbe to the Amoor —
within which dwell Germans, Sarmatians,
Ugrian Finns, Turks, Mongolians, and
Manchurians, peoples who strike with a
two-edged sword — a " Zone of Conquest."
Farther to the north nations are poor and
weak ; toward the equator, luxurious and
enervated. The inhabitants of this central
HOW NATIONS ARE AFFECTED BY THEIR ENVIRONMENT
zone have over-run their neighbours both
to the north and to the south, while never,
either from the north or from the south,
have they themselves suffered any lasting
injury. The Germans have advanced from
the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean ; the
Slavs inhabit a territory that extends
from the Arctic Ocean to the Adriatic Sea ;
the Turks and Mongolians have penetrated
as far south as India ; and there have been
times when Mongolians ruled from the
Arctic Ocean to Southern India. Finally,
the Manchurians have extended their
sphere of influence over Northern Asia as
far south as the tropic of Cancer.
These differences occur over again in
more restricted areas, even within the
temperate zone itself. The inhabitants of
the colder portions of a country have often
shown their superiority to the men who
dwell in the warmer districts. The causes
of the contrast between the Northerners
and the Southerners, which has dominated
in the development of the United States,
may for the most part be clearly traced :
the South was weakened by the plantation
EFFECT OF CLIMATE ON THE COURSE OF HISTORY
A map on which the isothermal lines are drawn is rich in historical
instruction. Where th? lines diverge we have regions of equal
temperature ; where they crowd together, districts of different mean
method of cultivation, and slavery ; its
white population increased slowly, and
shared to a lesser degree than did the
Northerners in the strengthening, edu-
cating influences of agriculture and manu-
facturing industries. Thus after a long
struggle that finally developed into a war,
the North won the place of authority.
In Italy and in France the superiority
of the north over the south is partially
comprehensible ; and in Germany the ad-
vantages possessed by Prussia,
Sunbeams ^^ j^^^ -^ ^^^^ ^^^ -^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^
and Ra.nfall ^j.g obvious. But when in
in History ^^^^^^^ history also the north is
found to have been victorious over the
south, conditions other than climatic
must have been the cause. In this case
elements have been present that are more
deeply-rooted than in sunbeams and
rainfall alone.
We must call to mind the zone-like
territories of early times, occupied by
peoples from which the nations of to day
are descended ; the boundary lines have
disappeared, but the northern elements
have remained in the north, and
the southern elements in the south.
It is well known that Aristotle
adjudged political superiority and
the sphere of world-empire to the
Hellenes because they surpassed
the courageous tribes of the north
in intelligence and in mechanical
instinct, and were superior to the
both intelligent and skilful inhabi-
tants of Asia in courage. " As the
Hellenic race occupies a central
geographical position, so does it
stand between both intellectually."
The thought that this union of
extreme intellectuality and power
in arms on Hellenic soil could be
the result of ethnical infiltration
did not seem to have occurred to
the philosopher. The fundamental
idea of Aristotle, the aristocratic
state, in which the talented Hellene
alone was to rule o\er bondmen
of various origins, who were, above
all, to labour for him, could not
have been possible had his views
been othersvise. And yet he
had clearly seen that the two
talents — for war and for industry —
were unequally distributed among
the different Hellenic stocks, and
that they were also variable
annual temperatures lie" close together. The crowding of climatic ^rrQrAvnp +0 time,
variations in any region enlivens and hastens tbe course of history. d.ci-uiuiiig tw miic.
391
lie close to one another. The
crowding of climatic variations in
any region enlivens and hastens the
course of history in that region. If
the variations occur only at long
intervals, all parts of a large territory
having approximately equal mean
annual temperatures, then climatic
contrasts, which act as a ferment, as
it were, are not present to any
appreciable extent, and their effects
lose in intensity and are dispelled.
Where are greater combinations
of contrasting climatic elements to
be found than in Greece and in the
Alps ? The joining together of the
natives of rich, fruitful Zurich with
the poor shepherds of the forests
and mountains was of the utmost
importance to the develoi)ment of
HOW THE SAME PEOPLES DIFFER ^j^^ g^^j^^ Confederation. It was
The Yakuts, who lead a nomad life in the valley of the Lena, and the „i^„ „„„;„„ „f r-ncrir^T,o r^f rnJIrl ■^■r.A
Turks who govern Western Asia, are of the same stock, but the genial aiSO a UUlOn OI I CglOUS OI milQ aUQ
cold temperatures. The possession
of Central European and Medi-
) govern
climate has enabled the Turks to flourish while the cold has kept the
Yakuts poor. These groups represent both branches of the stock
Considering the influence even of slighter
differences in climate, the locations of
regions of similar mean annual tempera-
ture, and the distances which separate
them from one another, cannot be other-
wise than important. A map on which
the isothermal lines are drawn is rich in
historical instruction. Where the lines
diverge we have regions of equal tempera-
ture ; where they crowd together, districts
of different mean annual temperatures
392
terranean climates, that shade into
one another without any sharp line
of demarcation, is a great advantage to
France. If climatic differences approach
one another in too great a contrast, clefts
in development are likely to occur, such
as the gap between the Northern and the
Southern States in America, and that
between North and South Queensland.
If it be possible to adjust the political
differences, then the union of areas of
HOW NATIONS ARE AFFECTED BY THEIR ENVIRONMENT
different temperatures has an in-
vigorating effect, as shown by the
history of the American Southern
States since 1865.
Winds blowing in a constant
direction for many months at a
time were of great assistance to
navigation during the days of
saihng vessels, which, indeed, have
not yet been entirely supplanted
by steamships. Before the time
of steam vessels all traffic on the
Indian Ocean was closely con-
nected with the change of the
monsoons ; and important political
expansions have followed in the
track of the same winds — for ex-
ample, the diffusion of the Arabs ^
along the east coast of Africa and f^
THE EFFECTS OF CLIMATE ON THE POWER OF PEOPLES
There is a world of difference between the two branches of the Tungnse race : the one is a poor people living in cold
regions and subject to Russia ; the other is the ruling race of the Chinese Empire, flourishing in a temperate climate.
The upper group is composed of ruling Tunguses in China and the lower group represents Tunguses subject to Russia.
in Madagascar. The influence of the trade
winds on the Spanish and Portuguese dis-
coveries along the Atlantic coast of America
is well known. The south-eastern trade
winds have been a cause of both voluntary
and involuntary emigrations of Polynesian
races. It may be clearly seen from the
history of Greece what advantage was ob-
tained by the race that won the alliance of
the coast of Thrace and the wind that blows
south from it with constancy during the
entire fair season, often eight months long.
Where the wind is most variable, visiting
entire countries with storms, to the great
destruction of lives and property, the
result is a stirring up of the survivors to
exertions that cannot fail to be strengthen-
ing both to body and to mind, and of direct
benefit to life in general. At the same
time that the people of Holland were
engaged in forcing back the ocean, they
won their political liberty. In another
part of the North Sea coast the Frisians
receded farther and farther south, owing
393
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
One of
the Greatest
Problems
to the invasions of the sea and the attacks
of the natives of Holstein. The tempest
that scattered the armada of Phihp II.
was one of the most important pohtical
events of the time ; and it is not to be
denied that the snowstorm in Prussian
Eylau, at the beginning of the battle in
which Napoleon suffered his first defeat,
contributed not a little to the result.
Acclimatisation is one of the greatest of
human problems. In order that a nation
shall expand from one zone
into another, it must be
capable of adapting itself
to new climates. The
human race is, as a whole, one of the
most adaptable of all animal species to
different conditions of life ; it is diffused
through all zones and all altitudes up to
about thirteen thousand feet above the
level of the sea. But single nations are
accustomed to fixed zones and portions
of zones ; and long residence in foreign
climates leads to illness and loss of life.
In some races the individuals are of a
more rigid constitution than in others,
and are thus less capable of adaptation.
Chinamen and Jews adapt themselves to
different climates far more easily than do
Germans, upon whom residence in the
southern part of Spain even, and to a still
greater degree in Northern Africa, is
followed by injurious effects. The constant
outbreaks of destructive disease before
which the German troops withered away
are to be counted amongst the greatest
obstacles opposed to the absorption of
Italy into the German Empire. During
the Spanish discoveries and conquests in
America in the sixteenth century, whole
armies wasted away to mere handfuls.
The greatest hindrances to German
colonisation in Venezuela are climatic
diseases. Medical science has, to be sure,
pointed out such deleterious influences as
may be traced to unsuitable dwelling-
places, nutrition, clothing, etc. ; and the
losses to Europe of soldiers and
officials in the tropics have been
wni-Power ^''eatly reduced. But even
to-day deaths, illnesses, and
furloughs make up the chief items in the
reports sent in from every colony in the
tro{)ics. British India can only be governed
from the hills, where the officials dwell
during the greater part of the year.
Climatic influence is not limited to
bodily diseases. One of the first effects
of life in warm climates upon men accus-
394
Climate
and
tomed to cold regions is relaxation of
what is known as will-power. Even the
Piedmontese soldier loses his erect car-
riage in a Neapolitan or Sicilian garrison.
Englishmen in India count on an ability
to perform only half the amount of work
they would be capable of at home. Many
inhabitants of northern countries escape
the bodily diseases of the tropics ; but
scarcely one man of an entire nation is
able to resist the more subtle alterations
in spirit.
Their historical influence extends only
the deeper for it. The conquering nations
that advance from north to south have
invariably forfeited their power, deter-
mination, and activity. The original
character of the Aryans who descended
into the lowlands of India has been lost.
A foreign spirit rings through the Vedic
hymns. West Goths and Vandals alike
lost their nationalities in Northern Africa
and Spain, as the Lombards lost theirs
in Italy. In spite of all emigration,
immigration, and wandering hither and
thither, there always remains a certain
fixed difference between the inhabitants
of colder and those of warmer
The Peoples
of North
countries ; it is the nature of
'"g"" the land, moulding the more
ductile character of a people
into its own form. There are differences
also between the northern and the
southern stocks of the same race, and
thus climate exerts here greater and there
lesser influence upon nations and their
destinies.
Since it lies in the nature of climatic
influences to produce homogeneity among
those peoples who inhabit extensive regions
of similar mean annual terrfperatures, it
follows that a unifying effect is also pro-
duced on political divisions that might
otherwise be inclined to separate from
one another. In the first place, a similar
climate creates similar conditions of life,
and thus the northern and southern races
of each hemisphere, with their temj:)erate
and their hot climates, differ widely.
Climate is also the cause of similar con-
ditions of production over large terri-
tories. Leroy-Beaulieu rightly mentioned
climate — above all, the winter, during
which almost every year the whole land
from north to south is covered with snow
— as next in importance to the configura-
tion of the country in its unifying, cohesive
effects on the Russian Empire. Winters
are not rare during which it is possible
A STORM THAT CHANGED THE COURSE OF HISTORY : THE WRECK OF THE ARMADA
The weather has g^reatly influenced the course of history and helped to mould the fate of nations. The tempest
that scattered the Spanish Armada in 1588 was one of the most important political events of the time. This
picture, from the painting by J. W. Carey, illustrates the wreck of the galleon " Girona," at Giant's Causeway.
to journey from A.strachan to Archangel
in sledges ; and both the Sea of Azov
and the northern part of the Caspian Sea
are frozen over during the cold months,
as well as the Bay of Finland, the Dnieper
as well as the Dwina.
Situation determines the affinities and
relations of peoples and states, and is
for this reason the most important of
all geographical considerations. Situation
is always the first thing to be investi-
gated ; it is the frame by which all other
characteristics are encircled. Of what
use were descriptions of the influence of
the geographical configuration of Greece
on Grecian history, in which the decisive
point that Greece occupies a medial
position between Europe and Asia, and
between Europe and Africa, was not
insisted upon above all ? Everything else
is subordinate to the fact that Greece
stands upon the threshold of the Orient.
However varied and rich its development
may have been, it must always have been
determined by conditions arising from
its contiguity with the lands of Western
Asia and Northern Africa. Area in par-
ticular, often over-valued, must be sub-
ordinated to location. The site may be
only a point, but from this point the most
powerful effects may be radiated in all
directions. Who thinks of area when
Jerusalem, Athens, or Gibraltar is men-
tioned ? When it is found that the Fanning
Islands or Palmyra Island is indispensable
to the carrying out of England's plans in
respect to telegraphic connection of all
parts of the empire with one another,
merely because these islands are adapted
for cable stations on the line between
Queensland and \'ancouvcr. is it not owing
to their location alone, without con-
sideration as to area, conliguration, or
climate ?
Every portion of the earth lends its
own peculiar qualities to the nations and
races that dwell upon it, and so does each
of its subdivisions in turn. Germany, as
a iirst-class Power, is thinkable only in
Europe. There cannot be either a New
York or a St. Petersburg in Africa. Our
organic conception of nations and states
renders it impossible for us to look upon
situation 'as something lifeless and pas-
sive ; far rather must it signify active
relations of giving and receiving. Two
states cannot exist side by side without
influencing each other. It is much more
likclv that such close relationships result
froni their contiguity ; that, for example,
395
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
we must conceive of China, Korea, and
Japan as divisions of a single sphere of
civihsation, their history consisting in a
transference, transplanting, action, and
reaction, leading to results of the greatest
moment. Some situations are, indeed,
more independent and isolated than others ;
but what would be the history of England,
the most isolated country in Europe, if
all relations with France, Germany, the
Netherlands, and Scandinavia were
omitted ? It would be incomprehensible.
The more self-dependent a situation is,
the more is it a natural location ; the
more dependent, the more artificial, and
the more it is a part of a neighbourhood.
Connection with a hemisphere or grand
division, identity with a peninsula or archi-
pelago, location with respect to oceans,
seas, rivers, deserts, and mountains, deter-
mine the histories of countries. It is
precisely in the natural locality that we
must recognise the strongest bonds of
dependence on Nature. Apart from all
other features peculiar to Italy, her
central position in the Mediterranean
alone determines her existence as a
Mediterranean Power. However highly
we may value the good qualities of the
German people, the best of these quali-
ties will never reach so high a develop-
ment in the constrained, wedged-in,
continental situation of their native land
as they would in an island nation ; for.
Germany's location is more that of a
state in a neighbourhood of states than
a natural location, and for this reason
more unfavourable than that of France.
Natural locahties of the greatest im-
portance result from the configuration
and situation of divisions of the earth's
surface. The extremities of continents —
such as the Cape of Good Hope, Cape
Horn, Singapore, Ceylon, Tasmania, and
Key West — are points from which sea
power radiates ; and at the same time
^X" / :-^^ f^^^^-l ! NOBTH £ acYJ W I N OS '^ g
4"
Pcfuxtiutt W'lndsll^lonioon.sjshoiyn l/iiis- -■— ■
PitvLuliiKj S Conslant Wtnds Jihot*nlhus ^:^
Outward Vovaije of Columbus shown thus -^<-
Uomeward \'o\aqe of Columbus shotvn thus — ••'L.-.r
POLITICAL EXPANSION HAS FOLLOWED IN THE TRACK OF THE WINDS
This map illustrating the trade winds and prevailing winds shows how important were these winds before the days of
steam vessels. It shows that the outward voyage of Columbus was entirely along the track of the north-east
trade winds. Where the arrows cross, as off the North-west of Scotland, we have regions of wind disturbances.
396
■^»»u
SOUTH
AMERICA
THE RIVERS OF TWO CONTINENTS AND THEIR INFLUENCE IN CIVILISATION
The influence of riverways in furthering political development may be best seen in the contrast between South
America and Africa ; the colonising movement came to Africa three hundred years later than to South America.
40 30 20 10 0 10 20 30 40 SO 60
EUROPEAN COUNTRIES AND THEIR NEARNESS TO THE SEA
A country's prosperity depends greatly upon its relation to the sea. This map shows the boundaries of European
countries; and the black lines indicate those countries that lie withm 150 and 500 miles from the sea-coast
THE RELATION OF RIVERS AND THE SEA TO THE CIVILISATION OF COUNTRIES
397
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
they are the summits of triangular
territories that extend inland and are
governed from the apex. In the same way
all narrowings of parts of continents are of
importance. France occupies an isthmian
position between ocean and sea ; Ger-
many and Austria between the North Sea,
the Baltic, and the Adriatic. Some states
are situated on the coast, occu-
The Ideal pying a bordering position ;
Situation Q^^gj-g occupy an intermediate
for a btatc Iq^^^^qj^ ^^^^ the more isolated
situations are all fundamentally different,
according to whether they are insular,
peninsular, or continental. Situations in
respect to the oceans are even more
various. How different are Atlantic
locations in Europe from those on the
Mediterranean, the Baltic, or the Black
Sea ! Only a few nations occupy a position
fronting on two great oceans. The ideal
natural situation for a state may be said to
be the embracing of a whole continent
within one political system. This is the
deeper source of the Monroe Doctrine.
Similar locations give rise to similar
political models. Since there are several
types of location, it follows that the
histories of such locations assume typical
characters. The contrast between Rome
and Carthage, their association with each
other, exhibiting the reciprocal action of
the characters of the northern and southern
Mediterranean coasts, is repeated in
similarly formed situations in Spain and
Morocco, in Thrace and Asia INIinor, and
on a smaller scale in the Italian and
Barbary ports. In all these places
events similar to those in Roman and
Punic history have taken place. Japan
and England are unlike in many respects ;
yet not only the peoples, but also the
political systems, of the two island nations
have insular characteristics. Germany
and Bornu are as different from each
other as Europe is from Africa, but cen-
tral location has produced
the same i:)eculiarity in each —
Contrasts
and
-, . a source of power to the strong
Comparisons ,. r • x ^u i
nation, of rum to the weak.
Contiguity with neighbouring states
brings with it important relationships.
The most striking examples of such con-
tiguity are to be seen in nations that are
cut of^ from the coast of their continent and
completely surrounded by other countries.
Owing to the constant reaching out for
more territory, such a situation in Europe,
as weU as in other continents, signifies
398
unconditional loss of independence. Only
connection with a great river can prevent
the dissolution of a nation so situated.
The instinctive impulse to extend its
boundaries to the sea, shown by all
nations, arises from the desire to escape
an insulated continental position. Only
the very smallest of states, such as
Andorra and Liechtenstein — which, more-
over, do not aspire to absolute inde-
pendence— could have existed for centuries
in the positions that they occupy. A
medial situation held by one country
between two others is also, in point of
risk, comparable to a completely encom-
passed position. France was so situated
when Germany and Spain were under the
same ruler. The alliance of two neigh-
bouring lands may place a third state in
a similar position.
Whatever the individual locations of
neighbouring states may be, their number
is a matter of great importance. It is
better to have a multitude of weak neigh-
bours than a few strong ones. The
development of the United States that
gradually ousted France from the south,
. Mexico from the west, and
^, . *^ Spain from both south and
National ^ , • j i 1 •. i,
„ „ west, m order to be m touch
with the sea on three sides, has,
with the decrease in neighbouring Powers,
resulted in an enviable simplification of
political problems.
A nation covering various dispersed
and scattered situations is to be seen at
the present day only in regions of active
colonisation and in the interiors of federal
states. Powerful nations are consolidated
into a single territory. We may see every-
where that when the area of distribution
of a form of life diminishes in extent,
it does not simply shrink uj), but trans-
forms itself into a number of island-like
sites, giving the appearance that the form,
of life is proceeding from a centre of the
conquest of new territory. In what does
the difference lie between islands of pro-
gress and of recession ? With nations and
states progress lies in the occupation of
the most advantageous sites ; retrogres-
sion lies in their loss and sacrifice. The
American Indians, forced back from
oceans, rivers, and fertile regions, form
detached groups of retrogression ; the
Europeans who took these sites from
them formed isles of progress as, one after
another, they seized the islands, promon-
tories, harbours, river-mouths, and passes.
THE MAKING
OF THE
NATIONS-IV
Professor
FREDERICK
RATZEL
THE SIZE AND POWER OF NATIONS
IT is not without reason that so much
importance is attached to extent of
surface in geography. Area and popula-
tion represent to us the two chief charac-
teristics of a state ; and to know them is
the simplest means — often too simple — for
obtaining a conception of the size and
power of a nation. We cannot conceive of
any man, much less a human
^. ** community, without thinking
*** *.f of surface or ground at the
Territory ,• t? ix- i
same time. Political science
may, through a number of clever con-
clusions, reduce the area of a state to a
mere national possession ; but we all
know that territory is too tightly bound
up with the very life of a state for it to
assume a position of so little importance.
In a nation, people and soil are organic-
ally united into one, and area and
population are the measure of this union.
A state cannot exchange or al er its
area without suffering a complete trans-
formation itself. What wonder, then,
that wars between nations are struggles
for territory ? Even in war the object is
to limit the opponent's sphere of action ;
how much more does the whole history of
nations consist in a winning and losing of
territory. The Poles still exist as they did
in former times ; but the ground upon
which they dwell has ceased to belong to
them in a political sense, and thus their
state has been annihilated.
During the course of history we con-
stantly see great political areas emerging
from th ' struggle for territory. We see
nations from early times to the present
day increasing in area : the Persian and
Roman Empires were small and
mean compared with those of
the Russians, English, and
Chinese. Also the states of
peoples of a lower grade of culture are
insignificant compared with the states of
more advanced races. The greatest empires
of the present day are the youngest ; the
smallest — Andorra, Liechtenstein, San
Marino, Monaco, appear to us only as
venerable, strange petrifications of an
The Vast
Modern
Empires
alien time. The relation of surface to the
growth of spheres of commerce and of
means of communication is obvious. Com-
munication is a struggle with area ; and the
result of this struggle is the overcoming of
the latter. The process is complicated
because, as control is gained over area, one
also acquires possession of its contents :
advantages of location, conformation,
fertility, and, by no means least, the
inhabitants of the territory themselves.
But the loss in value of all these things,
brought about by their being widely
scattered throughout an extensive area,
can be overcome only by a complete con-
trol of the region over which they are
spread.
The development of commerce is the
preliminary history of political growth.
This applies to all races, from Phoenicians
to North Americans, who point out to
us a post of the American Fur Company
as the germ from which Nebraska de-
veloped. Every colony is a result of
traffic ; even in the case of
Siberia, merchants from
Euro})ean Russia travelled
thither as far as the Ob about
three centuries before its conquest. The
phrase " conquests of the world's com-
merce " is perfectly legitimate. The build-
ing of roads is a part of the glory of the
founders and rulers of nations. To-day,
tariff unions and railway politics have taken
the place of road-making. It has always
been so ; both state and traffic have had
the same interest in roads and thorough-
fares. Traffic breaks the way, and the
state improves and completes it. It seems
to be certain that the firmly organised
state in ancient Peru opened the roads
which were later a service to traffic. In
a lower ]:»hase of development we may
see commerce leading directly to the
establishment of states ; in a higher, to
victory in war, arising from commercial
and railway communication. It would be
impossible for France to construct the
Sahara Railway without first subjugating
the Tuareg and seizing their country.
399
Traffic
Leads to
Empire
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
/
Highways of traffic as weapons for hostile
states, the important part played by com-
mercial nations and the culture of strictly
industrial and commercial peoples, the
endeavour of traffic to be of service to the
pohcies of states, and, finally, the power-
ful reactions caused by the removal and
disuse of thoroughfares of commerce to
races, nations, and to entire spheres of
civilisation — can only be indicated here.
Every political movement, whether it
be a warlike expedition or a peaceful
emigration, is preceded by movements
which are not political. Inquiries must
be made and relations instituted ; the
object must be determined, and the road
explored. All the while that knowledge
of the world beyond the bounds of a
country is being gained, there is also an
imperceptible broadening of the geo-
graphical horizon ; and this not only widens
out, but becomes clearer. Fabulous tales
are circulated as to the terrors of strange
countries ; but the fear gradually vanishes
as our knowledge increases, and with the
latter a spirit of p)olitical enterprise awakens
One can say that every trader who passes
the bounds of his country
Every Trader ^^^^^ ^-^ ^^^^^ ^-^^ ^-^
in his load of merchandise.
To be sure, there are both
long preparations made and quick leaps
taken in the processes of commerce.
Roman merchants prepared the way to a
knowledge of Gaul and its conquest. But
how different the attitude of the Romans
to Gaul before and after the time of
Cassar ! What a difference in the Spanish
estimate of the worth of American colonies
before the days o Cortez and Pizarro, and
afterward ! The broader and clearer the
geographical horizon grows, the greater
become political schemes and standards of
polcy.
The widening of the geographical horizon
and the clearmg up of mysteries beyond
are invariably a result of the travels of
individuals or of groups for peaceful pur-
poses. The first of these purposes is com-
merce ; the chase and fishing are also to
be taken into consideration ; and the
involuntary wanderings of the lost and
strayed are not to be excluded. Europe
possessed a Pytheas and a Columbus who
discovered new worlds ; and every primi-
tive comumnity had its explorers, too, who
cleared paths from one forest glade to
another. If such pioneers return, they also
bring back with them contributions to
400
Bears his
State with him
the general stock of knowledge of the world
without, and it becomes less difficult for
others to follow in their footsteps ;
finally armies or fleets may advance,
conquering in their tracks. Whenever
traffic makes busy a multitude of men,
and employs extensive means by which to
carry on its operations, the truth of the
sa5dng, " The flag follows
Causes of trade," is finally estab-
National Success 1- 1 j • •. 1 j -
. P .. lished m its broadest sense.
With all this struggling and
labouring, territory does not fall to the
state simply as a definite number of square
miles. Just as single individuals bring
enlightenment to the state, in the same
manner the idea of area arises in the
intelligence of the aggregate.
When we say that an area increases, we
must remember that by this we mean that
the intelligence which views it and the
will that holds it together have increased,
and naturally, also, that which is re-
quisite for rendering intelligence and will
capable for their work. In this lies one of
the greatest differences that exist between
nations, one of the greatest causes of suc-
cess and failure in development.
A disposition for expansion that ad-
vances boundaries to the farthest possible
limit is a sign of the highest state of
civilisation. It is a result of an increase
both of population and of intellectual
progress.
There is something very attractive in
the small political models of early times :
those city-states whose development had
in definiteness and in precision a great
deal of the lucidity and compactness of
artistic compositions. Liibeck and Venice
are more attractive than Russia. The
concentration of the forces of a small
community in a limited, beautifully situ-
ated, and protected location, is a source
of a development that takes a deeper
hold on all the vital powers of a people,
employing them more extensively, and
therefore ending in a more
Small States ^.^p-^ ^^^ definite perfection
of historical individuality.
Thus small areas take the
lead of large territories in historical
development ; and we may see many
examples of a slow but sure trans-
ference of leadership from the small
area to the large, and of the gradual
diffusion of progress in the latter. Thus
Italy followed Greece ; Spain, Portugal ;
England, Holland.
in Fine
Situations
401
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
The opposite of this is precocity in
growth : the earher a state marks out
its hmits without consideration for later
expansion, the sooner the completion of
its development. The growth in area of
Venice and the Low Countries stood
still, while all about them territories in-
creased in size. The development of small
countries flags unless the increase of popu-
lation within a limited area leads to that
disquiet and emigration and expulsion
of citizens especially characteristic of
small nations : the horizon grows too
narrow for the times ; patriotism becomes
local pride ; and the most important
Hfe forces are impaired. Thus minor
nations, through which races are separated
into httle groups, develop : the great
national economic and religious cohesive
forces are broken up ; and even the
political advantages of the ground are
reduced in value through disintegration.
Under such conditions the impulse for
new growth must be brought in from
without. The native, who is acquainted
with only one home, is always inferior to
the foreigner, who has a knowledge of two
lands at least. It is remark-
Founding ^^y^ j^^^^ numerous are the
Stran crs traditions of the establishment
rangers ^^ states by strangers. Some-
times these are mighty hunters, as in
Africa ; often they are superior bearers of
civilisation, as in Peru ; and an especially
large number of them have descended to
the earth from heaven. In the face of
history which tells of the foundation of
a Manchurian dynasty in China and a
Turkish in Persia, of the establishment of
the Russian Empire by wandering North
Germans, and that of the great nations in
the West Sudan by the Fulah shepherds
— these mythical accounts, although they
may appear decidedly incredible when
taken singly, as a whole are probable
enough. The foundation of the nation of
Sarav/ak in Borneo by Brooke is reality
and corresponds with many of the old
legends of the formations of states.
The broad conception of a state, which
acts as a ferment does on a disrupted
mass, is introduced from one neighbouring
nation into another, each sharing in its
production. When such territories are
adjacent, the state situated in the most
powerful natural region overgrows the
other. The more mobile race brings its
influence to bear on the less mobile, and
possibly draws the other along with it,
402
The more compact, better organised and
armed state intrudes on weaker nations,
and forces its organisation upon them.
A nation left to itself has a tendency to
split up into small groups, each of which
seeks to support its own life upon its own
soil, heedless of the others ; and as such
groups increase, they always reproduce in
their own images : families
A Great ^ families, and tribes tribes.
Turn.ng-pomt ^^.^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ ^^ measures
m IS ory taken by some nations to limit
an increase in growth that would carry
them beyond their old boundaries and
place them under new conditions of life.
Many an otherwise inexplicable custom
of taking human life is a result of this
tendency; perhaps, in some cases, even
cannibalism itself. This impulse towards
limitation would have rendered the growth
of nations impossible had not the anti-
thetical force of attraction of one t6 another
led to growth and amalgamation. Truly,
the advance from a condition of isolated,
self-dependent communities to one of traffic
between state organisms, which must of
necessity lead to ebb and flow and union
of one group with another, is one of the
greatest turning-points in the history of
man.
Since the tendency has been for terri-
tory to become the exclusive reward of
victory in the competition of nations,
balance of territorial possessions has grown
to be one of the chief ends of national
policies. The phrase " balance of power,"
which has been so often heard since the
sixteenth century, is no invention of
diplomats, but a necessary result of the
struggle for expansion. Hence we find
an active principle of territorial adjust-
ment and balance in all matters con-
cerning international politics. It is not
yet active in the small and simple
states of semi-civilised peoples ; such
states are much more uniform, for they
have all originated with a uniformly weak
capacity for controlling terri-
tory. In addition, the principle
ff . of territorial isolation hinders
eig ours ^^^ action of political com-
petition. As soon, however, as necessity
for increased area leads to the contiguity
of nations, the conditions alter. The state
that occupies but a small region strives
to emulate its larger neighbour. It either
gains so much land as is necessary to
restore equality, or forces a decrease in
the neighbour's territory.
Nations
THE SIZE AND POWER OF NATIONS
Both alternatives have been of frequent
occurrence. Prussia expanded at the
expense of Schleswig and Poland in order
to become equal in territory to the other
great Powers. The whole of Europe
fought Napoleon until France had been
forced back within such boundaries as
were necessary to international balance.
-, Austria lost ])rovinces in Italy
g J . and replaced them with others
p in the Balkan Peninsula. This
loss and gain ajjpears to us,
in looking over an easily epitomised
history, such as that of France, as an
alternation of violent waves and temporary
periods of rest attained whenever a
balance is reached. Therefore it is not
owing to chance that the areas of Austria,
Ge.many, France, and Spain may be
respectively designated by loo, 86, 84,
and 80, that the area of Holland is to that
of Belgium as 100 is to 90, and that the
United States stands to Canada as 100 to
96. To be effective, such balances must pre-
suppose equal civilisations, similar means
for the acquirement o power. Rome was
so superior to her neighbours in civilisa-
tion that she could not permit any terri-
torial balance. Perhaps the adoj>tion of
the River Halys as the boundary between
INIedia and Lyd a was a first attempt to
establish a national sj'stem on the principle
of balance instead of " world " dominion.
Our standards for measuring the areas
of countries have constantly increased
during the growth of historical territories.
The history of Greece is to us but the
history of a small state ; and how many
years shall pass before that of Germany,
Austria, and France will be but the history
of nations of medium size ? England,
Russia, China, and he United States
include the better half of the land of the
world ; and to-day a British Empire in
the other half could not be conceivable.
Development has ever seized on greater
and greater areas, and has
A New British ^^^-^^^ ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^
Empire is not . • • .
^ *^ . ^ , tensive regions into aggre-
gates. Thus it has always
remained an organic movement. The
village-state repeats itself in the city-state,
and the family-state in the race-state, the
smaller ever being reproduced in greater
forms. The smallest and greatest nations
alike retain the same organic character-
istics more or less closely united to the soil.
The surface of a state bears a certain
relation to the surface of the globe, and
according to this standard is the land
measured upon which the inhabitants of a
nation hve, move, and labour. Thus it
may be said that the 208,687 square miles
of the German Empire represent about ;i}o
of the entire surface of the earth ; further,
that the empire has a population of
60,500,000, from which the ratio of
5-45 acres to each individual follows.
Although it is true that wholly unin-
habited or very thinly populated regions,
high mountains, forests, deserts, etc., may
be valuable from a political j)oint of view,
nevertheless the whole course of the
world's history shows us that, as a general
rule, the value of territory increases with
the number of inhabitants that dwell upon
it. Thus, before their disunion, Norway-
Sweden, with an area of 297,000 square
miles — two-fifths greater than that of the
German Empire — but with a population
of 6,800,000, cannot be looked upon as a
first-class Power ; while Germany closely
approaches the Russian Empire in strength,
for although its area is but 4^1 that of the
latter, its population is only
one-half less. Thus area
alone is never the deciding
Area Does
Not
Mean Power
factor of political power. In
the non-recognition of this fact lies
the source of the greatest errors which
have been made by conquerors and states-
men. The powerful influence that small
states, such as Athens, Palestine, and
Venice, have exerted on the history of the
world proves that a great expanse of
territory is by no means indispensable to
great historical actions. The unequal
distribution of mankind over a definite
area is a much more probable source of
political and economic progress.
Civilisation and political superiority
have always attended the thickly popu-
lated districts. Thus the whole of de-
velopment has been a progression from
small populations dwelling in extensive
regions to large populations concentrated
in more limited areas. Progress first
awoke when division of labour began
to organise and differentiate among
heaped-up aggregates, and to create dis-
crepancies promoting life and develop-
ment. .A simple increase of bodies and
souls only strengthens that which is already
in existence by augmenting the mass. In
China, India, and Egypt, population has
increased for a long time ; but develop-
ment of civilisation and of political power
has been unable to keep pace with it.
403
^l,lul^-/^■_^-^^-.■w^-lwu'www^J■,-n-^-J^^-l^-^^w^^:
THE MAKING
OF THE
NATIONS— V
-nji-ii_ll-ji-jUJi--iwwwi-c
MWWWHVK
Professor
FREDERICK
RATZEL
jv-n^uMMHW^il-JMMl 'w-'i n n jhumi ^v-^^-l^-n-^^-lM^-^^-<u^=^r
aafi
^^M\ ti A^Mi-iMMv-iv-iwt A^-<M>-^-?r
THE FUTURE HISTORY OF MAN
LOOKING back upon the history of man,
it appears to us the history of the
human race as a hfe phenomenon bound
and confined to this planet alone. We are
thus unable to form any conception of
progress into the infinite, for every
tellurian life-development is dependent
upon the earth, and must always return
to it again. New life must
Man and ^^j^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ Cosmic in-
^ fluences may broaden or narrow
the districts within which man
is able to exist. This was experienced by
the human race during the Glacial Period,
when the ice sheet first drove men toward
the equator, and later, receding, enabled
them once more to spread out to the north.
The limits of world life in general depend
upon earthly influences ; and thus, for
mankind, progress hmited by both time
and space is alone possible.
Perhaps it would be well, for the elucida-
tion of the question of development, were
geography to designate as progress only
that which from sufficient data may be
established as such beyond all doubt.
Thus, to begin with, we have learned to
know of a progress in space — man's
diffusion over the earth — which proceeds
in two directions. The expansion of the
human race signifies not only an extension
of the boundaries of inhabited land far
into the Polar regions, but also the growth
of an intellectual conception of the whole
world.
Together with this progress there have
been countless expansions of economic
and political horizons, of commercial
routes, of the territories of races and of
nations — an extraordinarily
manifold growth that is con-
tinually advancing. Increase
of population and of the near-
ness of approach of peoples to one another
goes hand in hand with progressing space.
Mankind cannot become diffused uniformly
over new areas without becoming more and
more familiar with the old. New qualities
of the soil and new treasures have been
discovered, and thus the human race has
constantly been made richer. While these
404
Manifold
Growth of
Mankind
gifts enriched both intellect and will,
new possibihties were all the while arising,
enabling men to dwell together in com-
munities ; the population of the earth
increased, and the densely inhabited
regions, at first but small, constantly
grew larger and larger.
With this increase in number, latent
abilities came to life ; races approached
one another ; competition was entered
into ; interpenetration and mingling of
peoples followed. Some races acted
mutually in powerfully developing one
another's characteristics ; others receded
and were lost, unless the earth offered
them a possibility of diffusion over better
protected regions. Already we see in
these struggles the fundamental motive
of the battle for area ; and at the same
time, on surveying this progress, we may
also see the limit set to it — that increase
in population is unfavourable to the pro-
gress of civilisation in any definite area,
if the number of inhabitants
IS ory IS ^become disproportionately
,_.„ large in respect to the terri-
of Differences , ° ■ j nr
tory occupied. Many regions
are already over-populated ; and the num-
bers of mankind will always be restricted
by the limits of the habitable world.
Already in the differences in population
of different regions lie motives for the
internal progress of man ; but yet more
powerful are those incentives to the
development of internal differences in
races furnished by the earth itself through
the manifoldness of its conformation.
The entire history of the world has thus
become an uninterrupted process of
differentiation. At first arose the differ-
ence between habitable and uninhabitable
regions, and then within the habitable
areas occurs the action brought about by
variations in zones, divisions of land,
seas, mountains, plains, steppes, deserts,
forests — the whole vast multitude of
formations, taken both separately and in
combination. Through these influences
arise the differences which must at first
develop to a certain extent in isolation
before it is possible for them to act upon
THE FUTURE HISTORY OF MAN
one another, and to alter, either favour-
ably or unfavourably, the original charac-
teristics of men.
All the variations in race and in civilisa-
tion shown by different peoples of the
world, and the differences in power shown
by states, may be traced to the ultimate
processes of differentiation occasioned by
variations in situation, cli-
n'Ji f j**^** ^ mate, and soil, and to which
Reflected j.^ . .\ ■
. .. n , the constantly mcreasnis;
m its Peoples • i- r -^ .1,1°
mmglmg 01 races, that be-
comes more and more (omplex with the
diffusion of mankind over the globe, has
also contributed. The birth of Roman
daughter states, and the rise of Hispano-
Americans and Lusitano-Americans from
some of these very daughter nations, are
evidences of a development that ever strives
for separation, for diffusion over space,
which may be compared only to the trunk
of a tree developing, and putting forth
branches and twigs. But the bole that has
sent forth so many branches and twigs was
certainly a twig itself at one time ; and
thus the process of differentiation is
repeated over and over again. Progress
in respect to population and to occupied
area is undoubted ; but can these daughter
nations be compared to Rome in other
respects ? They have shown great powers
of assimilation and great tenacity, for
they have held their ground. Never-
theless, their greatest achievement has
been to have clung fast to the earth ; in
other words, to have persisted. Certainly
this is far more important than the
internal progress in which the branches
might perhaps have been able to surpass
the older nation.
It is an important principle that since
all life is and must be closely attached
to the soil, no superiority may exist
permanently unless it be able to obtain
and to maintain ground. In the long run,
the decisive element of every historical
force is its relation to the land. Thus great
forces may be seen to weaken
in the course of a long
struggle with lesser forces
whose sole advantage consists
in their being more firmly rooted in the
soil. The warlike, progressive, on-marching
Mongols and Manchus conquered China,
it is true, but they have been absorbed
into the dense native population and have
assumed the native customs. The same
illustration applies to the foundnig of
Decisive
Element in
a Nation
nations by all nomadic races, especially
in the case of the Southern European
German states that arose at the time of the
migration of Germanic peoples. The
health and promise of the English Colonies
in Australia present a striking contrast
to the gloom that reigns over India, of
which the significance lies only in a weary
governing, conserving, and ex])loiting of
three hundred millions of human beings.
In Australia the soil is acquired ; in India
only the j)eople have been conquered.
Will a time ever come when all fertile
lands will be as densely populated as
India and China ? Then the most civilised,
evolved nation will have no more space
in which to develop, maintain, and root
its better characteristics ; and the success
of a state will not result from the posses-
sion of active forces, but from vegetative
endowments — freedom from wants, longe-
vity, and fertility.
Even though the future may bring
with it a union of all nations in the world
into the one great community already
spoken of in the Gospel of John,
growth may take place only through
differentiation. And thus there
ft, °* is no necessity for our shar-
° .* ing the fear that a world-
& ions state would swallow up all
national and racial differences, and all
variations in civilisation.
From the fact that history is move-
ment, it follows that the geographer
must recognise the necessity for progress
in space in the sense of a* widening out of
the historical ground, and a progressive
increase of the population of this ground ;
further, a development toward the goal
of higher forms of hie together with an
uninterrupted struggle for space between
the older and newer hfe-forms. Yet, for
all this, the definite bounds set to the
scene of life by the limited area of our
planet always remain.
Finally, all development on earth is
dependent on the universe, of which our
world is but a grain of sand, and to the
time of which what we call universal
history is but a moment. There must be
other connections, definite roads upon
which to travel, and distant goals, far
beyond. We surmise an eternal law of all
things ; but in order to know, we should
need to be God himself. To us only the
belief in it is given.
Frederick Ratzel
405
THE FAR EAST DIVISION OF THE HISTORY OF THE AVORLD
• 1.1- i.u tr-„.. ,nH ^r.rr.cc iirpst u/a rfl round the world. Japan is therefore the first country to
This History begins with the ^astanj comes wes|wa^^^^ extending far west, must be treated as one.
come into its survey, and froni Japan we travel to r^mena , B j, ■ ^^ j,,g ..p^^^ g^^f ^„en thus
te^lefllolrllZcii^^^^^^ whUe p'rtiS.ronhis'nap is trLted in the Grand Division which now opeus.
406
SECOND GRAND DIVISION
THE FAR EAST
The Far East falls into two sections, Asiatic and Oceanic.
The Asiatic comprises the insular empire of Japan ; and,
on the continent, China, Korea, and Siberia, the extreme
northern territory which, though extending far westward,
must be treated as one.
The Oceanic division includes the Australian continent,
with the island of Tasmania ; the Pacific islands grouped
under the names of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia,
to which last New Zealand is attached, the whole being
conveniently associated under the name of Oceania ; and
the Malay Archipelago, or Malaysia, lying between Australia
and the Asiatic continent.
Of these three sections of Oceanic Far East only
Malaysia has a record extending over centuries. The
history of the other two, till the white sea-going races
began to settle among them, is inferential, conjectural. A
doubt was suggested whether New Zealand should be
attached rather to Australia than to Oceania, for the
reason that it has developed into one of the group of
autonomous states which make up so large a portion of
the British Empire ; but this consideration must clearly
yield to those based on geography and ethnology.
PLAN
THE INTEREST & IMPORTANCE OF THE FAR EAST
Angus Hamilton
JAPAN
Arthur Diosy and Max von Brandt
SIBERIA
Dr. E. J. Dillon and other writers
CHINA
Sir Robert K. Douglas. W. R. Carles, C.M.G..
and other ^^riters
KOREA
Angus Hamilton
AUSTRALIA & OCEANIA
Hon. Bernbard R. Wise and Professor Weule
MALAYSIA
Basil Thomson and other writers
INFLUENCE OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN IN HISTORY
L7\NDS & PEOPL
OF THE FXr E^^T
THE INTEREST AND IMPORTANCE
OF THE FAR EAST
BY ANGUS HAMILTON
""THE influence of environment upon a
■*• people is seldom shown more promi-
nently than in the high degree of civilisation
attained by the early Chinese.
Although the records are shrouded in
mystery and marred by discrepancies, a
consensus of scientific opinion traces the
origin of the Chinese to a nomad tribe
who, setting out from the shores of the
Caspian, continued to wander until it
found a home on the banks of the Yellow
River and in the plains of Shansi. Under
the influence of these immigrants, the rude
manners of the aboriginals gave way to
conditions in which a knowledge of the
smelting of iron and the resources of
agriculture was acquired. In the up-
ward process of development, the weaving
of flax into garments and the spinning
of silk from cocoons followed ; then,
with primeval chaos reduced to order
and the faculties quickened by habits of
industry, the beginnings of government
were made in the separation of the tribes
from one another under their own leaders.
While conditions of a settled existence
were in course of attainment within the
region which is now known as China
Proper, the spectacle of a prosperous
civilisation, reacting upon the uncouth
instincts of tribes dwelling among the
grassy uplands of Mongolia and the plains
of Manchuria or amid the ice-clad fast-
nesses of the mountains and forest-strewn
valleys of the farthest north, was presently
to be responsible for the rise of predatory
races, who, in the zenith of their strength,
regarded the teeming cities of the south
as lawful prizes. While the northern
heights of Asia were producing a race that
was to leave an indelible impression on
the whole of the Asiatic Continent, the
evolution of a no less spec fie type was
proceeding in the islands off the coast.
Carried by a wave of migration from India,
which lapped the coast of Malaysia,
Indo-China and Polynesia, and mingled in
the islands of the Yellow Sea with a stream
from New Guinea so that separate ethno-
graphic identities were lost, were tribes who
looked to the ocean for their existence
much as the earlier Chinese relied upon
the proceeds of their husbandry and the
northern nomads upon their flocks.
Glancing at the people living amid the
plains, the uplands, and the islands, it
will be seen that an irresistible force was
enveloping the several races, moulding
their instincts and idiosyncrasies in accord
with the nature of their environment.
Thus, while the Chinese, under the incen-
tive of a knowledge of arts and crafts, had
already produced, in 2356 B.C., a system
of civihsation destined to endure to our
time, the nomads and the islanders,
unqualified by knowledge and controlled
by climate, were hardly removed from a
state of savagery a few centuries before
the Christian era.
If the passage of 4,000 years has
affected the Chinese no more than the
gUding of an hour, the existence of this
409
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
great impassive people has not been with-
out its effect upon the nations of Europe
as upon the races of the Farthest East.
A point of ancient contact between
Christendom and the world of Confucius,
reflecting, in contemporary Japan to-
day the more permanent qualities of its
teaching, China has stirred the spirits of
the adventurous in all ages by
». its singular graces of refine-
/ch' ^ ment, its hidden wealth and
the exquisiteness of its artistic
perceptions. Arousing the curiosity of
the Arab traders as early as the eighth
century, it was known to the ancients,
if they journeyed by the Southern
Sea, as the kingdom of Sin, Chin, Sinae,
or China, in corruption, perhaps, of the
word Tzin — under which dynasty occurred,
in 250 B.C., the fusion of several petty
kingdoms into an organic empire ; or by
the name of Seres if, traversing the longi-
tude of Asia, they came by the overland
route. Known to the Middle Ages by the
name of Cathay — corrupted from Kitai, the
name by which Chma is still described by
Russia and by the races of Central Asia,
but which itself sprang from the Khitans,
the first of the northern dynasties — it
represented to European commerce of
the thirteenth century the embodiment
of wealth, romance, and mystery; much as
its position, maintained unchanged through
long centuries, had made it the actual
repository of the records of Central, as well
as Southern, Asia.
Contemporary with the early Egyptians,
the Assyrians, and the Hebrews, and com-
prising an empire that in 241 B.C. repre-
sented as nearly as possible the present
limits of the Eighteen Provinces, the
Middle Kingdom has been affected by
the great upheavals of the Western
world as little as she herself has troubled
to impress her methods and manner of
government upon the aboriginal races
beyond her borders. Indeed, filled with
-^ th ^ lofty disdain of the outer
Middl ' barbarians, it was not until the
j^. . chance migration to Korea
of some five thousand Chinese
under Ki-tze, in 1122 B.C., that the
ethical, social, and political systems in
vogue in China were carried further afield.
Once transplanted, however, the aboriginal
life of the cave-dwellers of the peninsula
gave way before the superior culture of
Ki-tze's followers, and within the course
of the succeeding thousand years a cluster
410
of independent states, fashioned upon the
parental model, was firmly established.
Although in the centuries just before the
Christian era there was a constant inter-
change of communications with these
states of the Eastern Peninsula, the classic
conservatism of the Middle Kingdom was
unabated by any expression of curiosity or
interest in the welfare of the unknown
islands. Yet the islanders, confronted with
a struggle for existence, had risked the
perils of many voyages to the neighbouring
coasts, spreading wonderful stories of their
own land and returning with ample evi-
dences of the power and importance of the
Korean kingdom. Unconscious of this
intercourse, but by reason of it, China,
the tutor of Korea, became through the
agency of her pupil a determining factor
in the upward progression of the islanders
when, between 290 B.C. and 215 B.C., in
consequence of dynastic difficulties, a
steady stream of inhabitants from the
peninsula passed from the Land of Morning
Radiance eastwards with the intention of
settling on the coasts of Japan, with whose
inhabitants, in fact, they at once merged.
Though at the other end of the pole
of human endeavour in comparison with
the Chinese, and familiar only
with the elemental accessories
to life, the islanders, under the
influence of this alien strain,
at the dawn of our era had emerged from
a state of tribal control to the recognition
of the authority of a single and supreme
ruler. Two centuries later Japanese arms
were strong enough to invade Korea,
where several victories were gained ; but
even then the Middle Kingdom maintained
no communication with the islands of the
Yellow Sea, and was more or less indifferent
to the rise of over-sea relations between her
vassal and the mariners from the East,
It is possible to trace to this obliquity in
the political vision of the Celestial Empire
of the day much of the subsequent havoc
that the self-same race were to inflict upon
the coasts of Asia. Impressed with no
consideration for the interests of the main-
land, and troubled by no sense of material
responsibility, Japanese corsairs harried
the Chinese and Korean coasts unmerci-
fully, finding in the occupation an outlet
for that primitive but inherited instinct for
aggression that stimulates the race to-day.
Disturbed less by the appearance of an
island Power than by a confederacy of
barbarian clans that, by 1000 A.D., had
Japan at
the Dawa of
Our Era
THE INTEREST AND IMPORTANCE OF THE FAR EAST
exerted a mastery over Mongolia, Tartary,
and Manchuria, and a century later
served as a menace to the safety of
the dynasty itself, the Celestial Empire
was beset on two sides by enemies who
were attracted by the prosperity of its
people. Unmindful to a great degree of
the dangers which were accumulating, an
instinct for and an interest in trade, con-
firmed by the revelation of the self-
supporting character of an empire that
reached to Cochin-China in one direction
and the Pamirs in another, prompted the
Chinese to neglect the arts of war in their
preference for the triumjihs of peace.
Characterised by a capacity for infinite
pains, and possessed of a complete under-
standing of the varied resources of agri-
culture, the Chinese insensibly pursued
a path leading always in a contrary
direction to those marked out by Nature
for the islanders, as for the fierce nomads
of the steppe. Thus innately addicted to
habits of peace, centuries upon centuries of
undisturbed prosperity chastened natures
that were never very warlike ; whereas the
exact inversion of this existence propelled
those hordes of Tartars, Huns, Turks,
^ Khitans, Kins, Mongols, and
p . J Manchus to leave the Far
the Chinese ^^^^^ ^" ^ disfiguring passage
through Asia, and bade the
islanders release their sails in expeditions
against Korea. It was not enough for the
founder of the Tzin dynasty to fortify his
northern frontiers by the construction of
the Great Wall, or for that great warrior
Panchow to drive the Huns before him to
theOxus itself, or for the rulers in the long
period of disunion which unites the fall of
the Han dynasty to the rise of the Sung to
compromise with the leaders of successive
rushes of barbarian horsemen by matri-
monial alliances with their families. The
cause lay in the foundations of the race
itself. Yet, such was the insidious charac-
ter of the land against which these mounted
hordes so often fiung themseK'es that,
although the imminence of attack ulti-
mately became a thing with which the
Government of China was wont to conjure
the peaceful, well-contented lower classes
and the lu.xury-loving upper classes, the
effect of each invasion was dissipated so
soon as the invaders experienced the subtle
blandishments of Chinese civilisation.
Presented with remarkable clearness,
we have an array of devastating invasions.
the one following the other in rapid
succession and occasionally assuming such
dimensions that the operations riveted the
attent.on of Europe ujion the little-known
lands of Asia, which in most instances
required only the passage of a few centuries
for the minutest vestige to be obliterated.
Thus the Kins, who left no trace, dis-
c ... . placed the Khitans, equally
„. . . , .... irrecoverable, and were m
nistory in Little , ,• j i^ ^i
I. , . turn dispossessed by the
Known Lands ,, , ' , •' . ,
Mongols, whose wide
dominion embraced so much of the
earth's surface that in 1227 a.d. the whole
of High Asia, from the Caspian to Korea,
and from the Indus to the Yellow Sea,
recognised its sway — always excej)ting the
strong but still despised sea-state of
Japan, whose lusty inhabitants threw
back the allied hosts of China, Korea, and
the Mongol monarch in 1274 and 1281.
Yet if the Mongols, in an effort to wreak
their vengeance on the Chinese, razed to
the ground the cities of the vanquished so
that their horsemen could ride over their
deserted sites without stumbling, none
the less they earned the acclamations of
posterity by the facilities that the Mongol
domination of Central Asia offered to
communications between the West and
Cathay. Marco Polo was not alone in his
knowledge of the Court of the Great Khan,
although doubtless he was the first to visit
it. But this liberty of intercourse, existing
only by the land route to Asia, was mea-
sured solely by the duration of the Mongol
rule ; freedom of action along the high-road
from West to East stopped prematurely
when the sway of Islam settled once again
over Central Asia. Two centuries elapsed
before, under the banners of the Manchus,
bold horsemen of the North, in 1644, flashed
once again through the plains of China,
imposing, by a change of costume and of
coiffure, perhaps the most striking effect of
any that has followed in the train of these
invasions.
But if the exclusivencss of the Moham-
medan conquerors closed the route to
. Cathay so effectually that for
Opening ^^^.^ hundred years nothing
the Gates of ^^^^^^ ^^.^^ j^^^^.^ ^^ ^j^^ country,
the Last Columbus, Cabot and others
set themselves the task of opening up
communications by water. But it was
not Cathay that they reached. That was
left to the Portuguese Raphael Perestralo
to accomplish by sailing, in 1511, from
Malacca to Canton, and thus winning
the coveted distinction of first approaching
411
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
China by sea. Fifty years later (1560)
the same race succeeded in obtaining a
settlement at Macao, while the Spaniards
gazed with longing eyes from their strong-
holds in the Philippine Islands upon the
rich junks on the China seas. Such was
the effect of these trading visits from the
West that the Chinese in their turn
were emboldened to visit for
"v •! themselves these outlying
. ■ centres of Western traffic. But
iQ Japan .. hi
it was more usually vessels
from Japan that were seen, for the Chinese
were still without any special appetite for
Western trade. With the islanders, oti the
other hand, a love of barter, acting on the
native instincts of a maritime people,
caused them to traverse these more distant
waters ; although occasionally the scanti-
ness of the resources in their own country
moved them, so that they were propelled
as much by stern necessity as by the
lust of war and loot or a passion for
trade. At first Polynesia, then Malaysia
and India were visited. Again, trips
were made to the remote coasts of Mexico.
Still later, a colony founded at Goa
became the centre of an important trading
connection throughout the Indian hemi-
sphere. In these voyages we see the
attractive influence exercised by the
Pacific and the Indian Oceans on an
island people, who, fitted by temperament
no less than by position, played in Eastern
waters the role filled by the Elizabethan
explorers on the coasts of the New World.
As yet the distinctive call of the East
had been heard only along the byways of
Turkestan, and even those who had
responded had ventured no further than
the provinces of Cathay. Thus the isles
of the Yellow Sea were to the Western
mariner at the dawn of the sixteenth
century as much a terra incognita as the
Arctic and Antarctic regions are to the
sailor of to-day. The spectacle of Japanese
junks sailing gaily across the heaving
waters of the Spanish Main
and rounding the heel of India
aroused the interest of the
Western traders, who at once
embarked for the fortunate lands of the
East, arranging relations there even before
they had been welcomed by the Chinese.
With the arrival of Portuguese traders
off Japan in 1542, a curtain was raised
which was never quite to descend. In
the interval a commercial entrepot was
established on the island of Hirado, and
412
Raising
the
Curtain
an intercourse set afoot that encouraged
a visit from a Spanish squadron towards
the close of the sixteenth century. This
visit was returned in 1602 by the despatch
of a ceremonial embassy to the Governor-
General of the Philippines.
Throughout the first half of that century
Japan continued to attract the adventu-
rous, and the Dutch now followed in the
wake of the Portuguese and Spanish
ships. The reception of the bold spirits
was unequal, and in 1624 all foreigners
except the Dutch and the EngUsh were
banished. By 1641 no traders were
allowed but Dutch, who, in spite of being
restricted to the island of Deshima,
enjoyed a monopoly of the trade with
Japan until 1867. In the meantime,
abroad, rumours of the untold wealth of
Asia had brought the Indies, together
with Cathay and Japan, into distinct
prominence. Under the Chinese Emperor
Kien-Lung, whose reign of sixty years,
1735-1795, was remarkable for its con-
quests and successful administration,
commercial intercourse with the West
was regularised, and the founding of
recognised trading settlements on the
China coast ended the era
^ ° . of furtive attempts to open
. . trade relations with this ex-
clusive people. From these
early trading stations have sprung the
several commercial capitals that now
grace the China coast. Hong Kong, Canton,
Shanghai, Tientsin, and Newchang are
the links existing to-day between the
magnificence of the merchant princes and
the sway of the " John Company." Of
course conditions are now much altered,
yet the memories of the past find a very
splendid setting in the size, dignity, and
importance of the modern treaty ports.
Although the Fai East was already mani-
festing its powers of holding the attention
of the civilised world, the centres of
interest there were concerned for many
years solely with the kingdoms of China
and Japan.
Australasia was a great unknown when
the high latitudes of Asia were the fount
of many conquering races. Obviously,
therefore, the magnet of acquisitiveness
pointed to the value of investigating the
bleak northern steppes. Once started,
the Pacific and the Amur were reached
within eighty years under the impetus
of an unrelenting progress which swept
from west, to eg^t across the regions of
413
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
North Asia. Begun at the instigation ot
Stroganoff, who pushed the hesitating
footsteps of Yermak across the Urals in
1580, by 1584 this gahant freebooter
was offering to Ivan IV. with no uncertain
voice the wide dominions of Siberia as the
price of pardon. Khan after khan was
unseated, tribe after tribe dispossessed,
for neither Tartar nor Turk,
Buriat nor Tunguse, could
China on
the Western
Horizon
offer effective resistance to
the Cossacks from the Don.
In the end this all-conquering advance
was stayed by the Chinese, who, in
the treaty of Nertchinsk, 1689, con-
tracted their first formal convention with
a foreign Power. For nearly two centuries
Russia faithfully observed the terms of
this engagement, apprehensive of en-
dangering the Kiachta trade if she con-
tinued her encroachments upon Manchu
territory. By this action the trade of
China, which has now made the problem
of the Far East of dominating importance,
became of more than passing interest to
a Western Government. As generations
passed, however, the advance of Russia,
to the Pacific in one direction, and in
search of a warm-water harbour in another,
was resumed. First Eastern Siberia and
then Northern Manchuria were added to
her Asiatic satrapy, and the Amur ceased
to be the containing line. Ultimately her
frontier rested on the ocean to the north,
the east, and the south ; Vladivostock,
Port Arthur, Harbin, and Mukden
becoming the centres from which her Far
Eastern dominions were administered.
The spirit of adventure, now inspiring
all ranks of society as well as most of the
civilised races of the world, was by no
means satisfied by territorial conquest.
The wide dominions of the sea, as yet
untraced and all unknown, embraced an
empire which appealed as strikingly to
the sympathies of geographers as did the
prospects of Far Eastern trade to the
feelings of the East India
merchants. Much the same
- .. ceaseless quest carried the
Cossack Dejneff, in 1648, round
the north-eastern extremity of Asia ; Torres,
a Spaniard commissioned by the Spanish
Government of Peru, in 1606 nego-
tiated the strait between New Guinea
and the mainland ; and various Dutch
expeditions in 1606, 1616, 1618, 1627 and
1642 endured the dangers of the reef-
bound coasts. But it was not until t688
414
The English
Find
that the English first made their appear-
ance on the Australian coast. In
some measure the situation was await-
ing the man. The voyages of Captain
Cook (1769-1777) took up the work of
geographical exploration in the Southern
Hemisphere in a style quite befitting the
records already elsewhere accomplished.
If between the continent of Australia
and the coasts of China to-day thereis only
a commercial connection, it must not be
forgotten that Australia is closely identified
with the Polynesian races, who in turn
are related to the early Japanese. New
Zealand, Australia, New Caledonia, and
New Guinea, as parts of one and the
same continent, which now in many places
has disappeared beneath the sea, pi'esent
an ethnographic study of unusual impor-
tance and interest. In few other parts
of the world is so great an ethnographic
variation imposed upon a single con-
necting racial family as in the island
divisions of the South Seas — Australasia,
Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. It
is by the existence of this underlying
relationship that the Indo-Pacific races,
whatever their specific origin,
aci ic an undoubtedly link up two
the Destinies , • , v- 1, • n
J p J hemispheres which organically
eop es ^^^ widely separated. By the
abruptly disintegrated character of exist-
ing racial location, however, it is possible
to read the impression made by the
Pacific Ocean on the history of the world.
If oceanic influences are represented in
other ways to-day, and tribal migrations
in a body are occurrences of the past, the
necessities of the age still make such
heavy demands on what is, after all, the
immemorial highway of mankind that the
Pacific can still be said to mould the
destinies of races to-day as easily as it
has obliterated them in the past.
Turning to Asia, although the Empires
of Russia in Siberia and of China
have worked out their destinies inde-
pendently of the Pacific, remaining un-
affected by it more than all other Eastern
states, the part that the Pacific has played
in the development of Asia since the
eighteenth century cannot go unnoticed.
Japan, in particular, has profited by the
readiness of communication that the
ocean provides to rise above prejudices
which are usually inseparable from an
island people and are pre-eminently to be
expected among Asiatics. In China the
absence of any prominent dependence on
THE INTEREST AND IMPORTANCE OF THE FAR EAST
the sea, either for food or means of trans-
port, has produced in very sinister form
an aversion against the West. None the
less, under pressure from the Occident,
and without regarding the example set
by Japan, the Celestial Empire has
permitted much commercial encroach-
ment. Succeeding the galleons of the
buccaneers have come the stately traders
of the merchant princes of Europe and
America, and these in turn have given
place to the steamers of industrial trusts,
exacting as large a tribute as the earliest
marauders. While the consequences of
industrial expansion among Oriental people
have made the Pacific the focus of much
restless energy, Japan, now as great a
Power on land as foiTnerly she was, and
is, at sea, has developed an intelligence
that has made her pre-eminent among the
trading nations of the East. Undeterred
by exertion, unmoved by expenditure,
Japan has displaced the carrying trade
of the Pacific by her fearless invasion
of Western markets. Throughout the
isles of the Southern Seas, and up and
down the face of the Pacific slope, the
. islanders have swarmed, filUng
„ * ^* the lands of their passage with
Happen - j
To-morrow ?""^^^"^^°"^^^ energy.
Looking back, then, at the
conditions of Asia in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, and comparing them
with those existing to-day, it will be noticed
that a wide gulf still separates Japan Irom
China in the twentieth century as it
formerly separated China from the rest of
the Far East. On the one side there
is China, now emerging from revolution ;
on the other there is Japan, voicing the
regeneration of Asia with raucous tones.
Meanwhile the vast interests of the
Occident in the Orient are united with
either power by frequent political inter-
course and a traffic which has given to the
Pacific priority of place in the battle for
commercial supremacy. Yet while China
is commercially independent of the West,
and Japan dependent upon it, all branches
of foreign industry cannot but view with
alarm the increasing aggressiveness of
the spirit of independence now inspiring
Asia at the prompting of Japan. Obvi-
ously these signs are the indication of
an approaching cleavage between East
and West, which, when fully attained,
will bear witness to the complete severance
of the shackles hitherto enthralling Asia
to the interests and purposes of the West,
It must not be forgotten that Japan
already has achieved her complete re-
generation. Thirty years hence China,
no doubt, will have followed suit, when a
fedcracy of the Far Eastern Powers may
become an accomplished fact. Even at
this moment such a union is possible,
^.. and its realisation would
China ., T-
-,. . , impose upon all European
„ Governments the immediate
revision of their Asiatic policies.
At this time such a combination is
hampered only by the unwillingness of
China to accept the suggestions of Japan
in anything affecting the policy of Asia,
although, in spite of this objection, active
reforming influences are gradually effect-
ing important changes throughout the
Chinese Empire. For the moment,
therefore, Japan is content to tread alone
the path she has marked out, encouraging
her subjects by example to exploit Asia
for the Asiatics, and to secure recogni-
tion of the doctrine of equality between
the white and Asiatic races.
If the full significance of this move-
ment is not yet discernible, there is enough
evidence to show that the problem will
rank among the greatest that the politics
of the twentieth century can disclose. Not
only one part of the civilised globe will be
affected by the rise of a dominant Asia,
for the whole world will be confronted
equally with the necessity of resisting
whatever indications may appear. If
it is difficult to devise an arrangement
short of total exclusion that does not
admit an annual influx of a large number
of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or Indian
immigrants into the lands affected by this
invasion, it is at least tolerably certain
that if the existing flow of Asiatics across
the Pacific to America and Australasia
continues unabated for a further decade,
the areas now menaced will be inhabited
by a white minority.
It appears evident that the continuation
of the Far East under existing conditions
is doubtful, if not impossible, in
/th ^™ view of the awakening of Asia
-, and the visible prejudices
en ury ^j^^^ Western democracy enter-
tains against the Asiatic. Yet if the clash
of conflicting interests ultimately pre-
cipitates a struggle between the two
great racial divisions of the world, there
can be no doubt that the moral teachings
of humanity will be discredited.
Angus Hamilton
415
GREAT DATES IN THE HISTORY OF JAPAN
B.C.
660
A.D.
59
"25
202
397
552
645
675
689
750
782
800
889
1155
1186
1 192
1220
•275
1281
i333
•337
•543
•549
1574
I5«i
1582
•583
•592
1598
1606
1615
1617
1621
1624
•637
1641
1694
1702
416
To 500 A.D.
Supposed foundation of the Japanese
Empire by Jimnm
Emperor Suinin flourished. Abolition
of the practice of burying retainers
alive on the master's death
Reputed Korean immigration
Legendary hero Yamato Dak6
nourished
Reputed conquests in Korea by Empress
Jingo Kogo
Probable introduction of Chinese civili-
sation, through Korea
500-1000
Introduction of Buddhism
The Taikua Laws of Kotoku
Encouragement of Puddhism by Temmu
The Laws reduced to a written code
Development of the Samurai class
Emperor Kwammu
Eusion of Shinto with Buddhism by
Kobu Daishi
High offices become hereditary in the
Fujiwara family
1000-1500
Wars of the Taira and Minamoto
clans
\'ictory of the Minamoto
The ^Iinamoto Shugunate established.
Japanese feudal system
Supremacy of the Hojo family
Attempt of Kublai Khan to invade
Japan
Destruction of the Chinese (Mongol)
Armada
Ashikaga revolt and overthrow of the
Hnjr.
Rival Mikados of the North and South
for fifty-five years
1 500- 1 800
First appearance of Europeans (Portu-
guese) in Japan
Francis Xavier attempts to introduce
Christianity
( )verthrow of Ashikaga by Nobunaga
Rapid development of Christianity
Death of Nol)unaga. Supremacy of his
general Hideyoshi (Taiko Sama)
Envoys sent from feudal lords to the
Pope
Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea
Death of Hideyoshi. Accession to
power of lyeyasu
Prohibition of Christianity
Restoration of Minamoto Shogunate
Foreign trade limited to two ports
Ja|:)anese prohibited from foreign travel
Decreeof e.xjnilsion against all foreigners
except Dutch and Chinese
Peasant and Christian revolt
Dutch and Chinese restricted to Nagasaki
Development of trade-guilds
Russian squadron visits Japanese coast
A.D.
1804
1818
1844
1848
•853
'854
I8S5
1856
•859
1861
1862
• 863
1864
1866
1867
1868
18655
1871
1872
•873
1874
•875
1876
1877
1879
1889
1890
1894
1895
1897
1899
1900
1902
1904
'905
1907
1910
1911
1800-1867
Russia attempts unsuccessfully to open
relations with Japan
Captain Gordon at Yedo Bay
Holland makes proposals for extension
of trade
Visit of American and French warships
to Japanese waters
Conunodore Perry in Yedo Bay
First Japanese Treaty with a Western
Power (U.S.A.) in ^Iarch. First Treaty
with Great Britain in October
Russian Treaty
Dutch Treaty
Readmission of Christian missionaries
Attack on British Legation
Murder of Mr. Richardson
Japanese Embassy to the Treaty Powers
Bombardment of Kago-shima by British
Bombardment of Shimonoseki by inter-
national squadron
Contest and reconciliation of the two
great clans (Sats-cho)
Kei-ki, last Shogun
New Conventions with Western Powers
Accession of Mutsu-hito as Mikado
Appointment of Europeans : French
military and British naval instructors
Resignation of Shogun Kei-ki
1868-1907
Restoration of imperial power
The Emperor takes up residence at
Yedo, re-named Tokio. Emperor's
" charter" oath
The Daimiyo surrender feudal rights
Feudalism abolished
Establishment of religious toleration
Adoption of Gregorian Calendar
Universal Military Service
Saga rebellion. Formosan e.xpedition
Saghalin exchanged for Kuriles
Korean Treaty
Revolt and death of Saigo
Annexation of Riu-Kiu Islands
Promulgation of the Constitution. Es-
tablishment of local self-government.
Anti-foreign reaction
First Imperial Parliament. New civil
and commercial codes
War with China
X'ictory over China. Formosa annexed
Revised customs tarifT. Gold standard.
Freedom of Press and pul)lic meetings
New Treaties on terms of equality.
Opening of the whole country
P"xi)edition against Boxers in China
Anglo- Japanese agreement
War with Russia
Victory over Russia. Japan obtains
Port Arthur, S. Saghalin, control of
S. Manchuria, and protectorate of
Korea
Anglo-Japanese alliance
Franco Japanese Agreement
Russo-Jap;mese Convention
Korea annexed
Anglo-Ja|)anese Agreement
• -^rnryyis r^ ifTT^
PIHfT?^CT^'
^
JAPAN
THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE
BY ARTHUR DIOSY
THE EMPIRE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
ASIA'S furthest outpost towards the vast
waters of the Pacific Ocean, a long,
narrow chain of rocky, volcanic islands,
extends north-east to south-west along the
eastern coast of the mainland, separated
from it by the Sea of Japan and the China
Seas. A glance at the map shows this
long string of more than three thousand
islands and islets, stretching from 51° 5'.
the latitude of Shumo-shu, the most
northern of the Kurile group of islands,
down to 21° 48', the latitude of the South
Cape of Formosa, a total
Length and ^^^^^\^ of nearly thirty degrees.
Breadth of j^^ component parts extend
Great Japan ^^^^ ^_^o ^^> ^^^ longitude, at
Shumo-shu, as far westwards as 119° 20',
the position of the extreme western islets
of the Pescadores, or Hokoto, archipelago,
a distance of nearly thirty-eight degrees,
the total breadth of the Empire of Dai
Nippon — Great Japan.
The enormous length of the island
empire, the configuration of which is
likened by the Japanese to the slender
body of a dragon-fly, provides a great
variety of climate, from the Arctic rigour
of the Kurile Islands and the Siberian
climate, with its long and terrible winter
and its short but fierce summer, obtaining
in the larger northern islands, to the
sweltering, steamy heat of Formosa, the
tropic of Cancer passing through that
island and through the Pescadores. These
?7 '
extreme temperatures apart— and they
prevail only at the ends of the empire-
Japan possesses a temperate chmate
similar to that of the northern shores of
the Mediterranean, but colder in winter
and much damper, the excessive humidity
causing both heat and cold to be very
trving, though never dangerous. The
rainfall is especially heavy in June and
in September, but no month is entnely
without rain. The hottest period of the
year is called do-yo, corresponding to our
'' dog-days," and follows the rainy season
of June and early July. .
Japan owes its great humidity, the
consequent fertility of such jxirts of its
surface as are cultivable— about 84-3 per
cent, of the whole area of Japan proper
is too rocky to yield food tor
What Japan ^^j^__^„^ tl^P luxuriant ver-
Owesto ^^jj.g ^j^j^^ clothes the lower
its Position ^j^j^g^ ^f j^g wooded hills, to
its insular position, and, chiefly, to two
great factors, a current and a wind.
The great warm current known as the
Kuro-shio, the Black Brine, or Black
Tide, flowing from the tropical region
between the Philipinnos and Formosa,
raises the temperature of the east coast.
and, where it is in part deflected by
contact with the southern coast ot
Kiu-shu, also of the west coast, acting
in the same beneficent manner as the Cull
Stream of the Atlantic The wind that
417
Kovstone View Co.
A GLIMPSE OF THE INLAND SEA, THE LOVELIEST SHEET OF WATER IN JAPAN
Studded with hundreds ol islands, every part of the Inland Sea of Japan, stretching 240 miles in length, and widening
once to 4(J miles, offers an enchanting prospect. The islands occur often in clusters, giving the appearance of lakes.
affects the Japanese climate most strongly
is the north-east monsoon, tempered by the
action of the dark, warm, ocean current.
The geographical position of Japan
has had great influence on the history
of its people, and clearly indicates the
supremely important part the empire
is destined to play in the future develop-
ment of the Far East. Its insular charac-
ter has preserved it from invasion — it
is the proud and legitimate boast of the
Japanese that no foe has, within historical
times, trodden Japanese soil for more
than a few hours — and whilst it rendered
possible the seclusion in which the nation
lived for more than two centuries, develop-
ing, undisturbed, a high civilisation of
its own, the basis of many of the qualities
displayed by the Japanese in our day,
it has been, in recent times, the cause of
Japan's real might in the world — her sea-
power, naval and commercial.
The map shows the four principal
islands of Japan Proper: Hon-§hu, or
418
Hon-do — " Principal Circuit," the largest
island of Japan, commonly called Nippon,
really the name of the whole empire,
meaning " Sun-origin," equivalent to
Sunrise Land ; Kiu-SHU, or Nine Pro-
vinces ; Shi-koku, or Four States ; and
the great northern island of Yezo, the
second in size, officially termed Hok-
kai-do — " North Sea Circuit."
The four islands extend, opposite the
mainland, from the coast of the Russian
Maritime Province, on the north-west,
down to the southern extremity of the
Korean peninsula, on the south-west.
North of Yezo, facing the month of the
great River Amur, the long, narrow
island of Saghalin — Karafuto, in Japanese
^^belongs partly to Russia, partly to
Japan, its southern districts, up to the
fiftieth degree of latitude, being ceded to
the victors by Article IX. of the Treaty
of Portsmouth (1905). Separating these
islands- important channels afford com-
rnunigation between the Sea of Japan and
A CRATER WITH EIGHTY VILLAGES, IN WHICH TWENTY THOUSAND PEOPLE LIVE
Twenty thousand people live in eighty villages in the outer crater of Aso-san, probably the largest crater on
earth, competing:, says Professor Milne, with some of the great craters of the moon. The crater of Aso-san is from
10 to 14 miles across, and its wall is everywhere 2,000 feet high, the highest peak being Taka-dake, 5,«:t(» feet.
the Pacific. The Gulf of Tartary divides
Saghahn from the mainland, whilst the
Strait of La Pcrouse, or Strait of Tsugaru,
separates the island from Yezo. The
Straits of Korea, between that empire,
now under the protectorate of Japan, and
the main island, Hon-shu, or Nippon, are
the way of communication joining the
Sea of Japan and the eastern part of the
China Sea, the straits being divided into
three channels by the island of Iki
and by those of Tsu-shima, a name
rendered for ever glorious by Togo's
great victory on May 27th, 1905. The
various straits are sufficiently narrow to
be easily closed to an enemy by Japan's
splendid fleet.
Although Japan has remained immune
from invasion throughout historical time,
its proximity to the mainland, and especi-
ally to the Korean peninsula, led, in pre-
historic ages, to its receiving from the
continent an influx of immigrants who
gradually conquered the insular natives,
and whose descendants probably form the
main stock of the present Japanese race.
It was this proximity that brought the
civilisation of China into Japan, in the
first instance through Korea ; the same
route was followed by another mighty
invasion of foreign thought, the intro-
duction of Buddhism.
No country has been better fashioned
by Nature for the acquirement of sea-
power than the Island Empire of the
Rising Sun. Its enormous extent of coast-
line, with countless indentations, esj^ci-
ally numerous on the south-eastern coasts
of Hon-shij, Shi-koku, and Kiu-shu, its
many excellent harbours, naturally forti-
fied by reason of the narrow entrances to
the gulfs in which they are situated — for
example: Nagasaki, in Kiii-shu, the naval
stations at Sasebo, in the same island.
Kure, in the Inland Sea, and Yoko-
suka, near Tokio Bay — and, above all, the
419
Keystone View Co.
HAKONE LAKE AND THE GATEWAY TO THE INARI TEMPLE IN KIOTO
Hakoni'' Lake, the top picture, is a delightful summer resort. The bottom picture, the avenue of Torn (portals), formmg
the entrance to a Shinto Temple at Kioto, is a wonderful sight. There are over 4U0 Torii, arranged ni two colonnades.
420
Keystone View Co.
A GLIMPSE OF THE BUSY NAGOYA CANAL AND OF THE PARK AT KUMAMOTO
Naeova is one of the great manufacturing cities of Japan, and a busy canal links the city with the Port of
Yokkaiehi The park of Suijenji, ia Kwrnnnoto. it a beautiful example of Japanese landscape gardening.
421
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
excellence of its seafaring population,
supply the elements that give Japan the
mastery in Far Eastern waters.
In the thousands of hamlets nestling in
the bays, large and small, and creeks of the
Japanese islands, dwells a hardy race of
fishermen, inured to peril and fatigue, men
of brawny strength and indomitable pluck,
-, , . frugal and enduring, as fine
Seafaring r • i x xl • r
^ ,.^. , material for the mannmg of
Qualities of , . i . j- ?-
, warships and trading craft as
Japanese ^, U i i
the world has ever known.
The persistence of those seafaring qualities
which the Japanese owe chiefly to the
natural advantages of their island home —
partly, no doubt, to a strain of the blood
of Malay sea-rovers, perhaps also of Poly-
nesian canoe-men — is a remarkable phe-
nomenon. In olden times they were bold
seafarers, roaming as far as the Philippines
and the coast of Indo-China. Th6 waters
of Formosa and of Siam were the scene
of their piratical exploits, for, like all
nations destined to be great at sea, they
passed through a period when the spirit
of adventure, as much as the lust for
spoil, made them into daring sea-robbers.
But, with the closing of Japan to foreign
intercourse — save on a strictly limited
scale — early in the seventeenth century,
came the enactment of laws devised to
prevent the Japanese from visiting foreign
parts ; the tonnage and build of ships were
fixed by these decrees in such a manner
that only fishing and coasting trips were
thenceforward possible. This prohibition
lasted for two centuries and a half; yet, on
its removal, the germ of the seafaring
qualities, supposed to have died out, was
found to have been only in a state of
suspended animation ; it revived with
surprising rai)idity. In less than a quarter
of a century it produced a naval personnel
ca])able of manning a highly efficient
fleet of thirty-three sea-going fighting-
ships ; in ten years more the amazed
world recognised Japan's Navy as the
triumphant victor in the
,^ greatest battle since Trafalgar,
and coupled Admiral Togo's
name with that of Nelson.
The sea has, indeed, ever been Japan's
friend ; to this day it supports a large
number of the population, and, in a sense,
it may be said to keep the whole nation
alive, as the fish that teem in Japanese
waters sup]>ly a considerable part of the
people's food. Every marine product
available as nutriment is utilised, even
422
The Sea
as Japan's
Friend
seaweed of various kinds being largely
used as food. Fishing seems to have been
practised from the earliest times ; it is
probably in recognition of its antiquity
and national importance that the Japanese
of our day still affix to any gift a strip of
dried seaweed, passed through a piece of
paper peculiarly folded, the idea they thus
symbolise being, it is said : " This is but
a trumpery present, but it comes from a
cheerful giver ; be pleased to take it as
it is meant. Remember our forefathers
were poor fisherfolk ; this strip of seaweed
is to remind you that poverty is no
crime."
There are many other customs connected
with the harvest of the sea, and innumer-
able legends and folk-tales wherein the
chief part is played by some marine spirit
or by a visitor — deity or mortal — to the
mysterious realms of the deep. And deep
it is, for, off the eastern coast of Northern
Japan, the sea-bed falls abruptly to a
depression — the famous Tuscarora Deep,
called after the United States warship of
that name — of 4,655 fathoms, nearly
28,000 ft., or more than five miles, prob-
. , ably the deepest sea-bed in the
apans yyorld. The encircling sea forms
Beautiful , , f .
g an important part 01 most
^ of the beautiful pictures the
scenery of Japan offers to the delighted eye.
Whether the waves dash tumultuously
against the precipitous rocks of the south-
eastern side of the main islands, especially
of Shi-koku and Kiii-shu ; whether the
waters dance in the sunshine in the count-
less bays and creeks of those coasts where
the frequency of the shelter afforded to
fishing-craft led to an earlier and more
dense settlement than on the north-west
coast of Hon-shii ; whether the far-famed
Inland Sea shines like a mirror under the
moonbeams, or the Sea of Japan tosses its
grey billows or spreads a sullen expanse
under the pall of fog caused by the meeting
of warm and cold currents — in all its moods
the ocean forms part of nearly all the
grandest scenery of Japan.
The " Three Views," known to every
Japanese man, woman and child, for they
are portrayed in countless pictorial
representations, are sea-scapes. The 808
islets of Matsu-shima, with the thousand
trees from which the group derives its
name of Pine Islands, are the glory of the
province of Sen-dai, in Northern Hon-
shu ; the hoary tori-i, or gateway, of the
great Shin-to temple at the sacred island
SCENES
JAPAN AFTER AN EARTHQUAKE
Thereisatleastoneshockofearthquakeeveryday in Japan; there are 300 shocks in a vear. As late as 1801 an earthquake
jailer ones, These photographs snow the havoc of such earthquakes.
wrecked two populous towns and destroyed two sma
423
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
of Miya-jima, or Itsuku-shima — so holy
that no birth nor death may take place
on the island, and no dog is allowed there
— stands firmly amidst the very waves
of the Inland Sea ; Ama-no Hashidate,
the " Sacred Bridge," stretches its slender
two-mile length of sandy spit, only 190 ft.
broad — crowned, all along, with an avenue
of pine-trees — into the blue waters of the
gulf of Miya-zu, in the Sea of Japan.
The so-called Inland Sea, 240 miles long
from its narrow western entrance, only
one mile across, between Shimo-no-seki
on the main island and Mo-ji, the busy
colliery port in Kiu-shii, to its eastern
extremity, where it joins the open sea
through the Aka-shi and Naru-to Straits
— it widens to forty miles where the Bun-
go Channel divides Shi-koku from Kiushu
— is perhaps the most lovely sheet of
salt water in the world. Studded with
many hundreds of islands, every part of
its expanse offers an enchanting prospect,
the islets being often in clusters, making
many stretches appear like lakes.
Water enters into the beauty of every
Japanese landscape ; districts remote from
the sea have their lakes and rivers —
generally short, swiftly-flowing streams,
almost, sometimes quite, dry in summer,
exposing beds of pebbles, but rushing
torrents in the wet season,
Biwa is the largest lake in Japan, and
far-famed for its scenery; its area is
about the same as that of the Lake of
Geneva, and it is nearly as beautiful.
Lake Chii-zen-ji, or Chu-gu-shi, is sur-
rounded by luxuriant verdure at an
altitude of 4,375 ft. above sea-level, and
is surpassed in beauty by the smaller
Lake Yumoto, higher up, in the sulphur-
springs region, 5,000 ft. above the sea.
MODERN YOKOHAMA: THE HARBOUR,
Keystone V'kw Cc
SEEN FROM THE HEIGHTS OF THE TOWN
426
OVERLOOKING MODERN TOKIO, THE CAPITAL OF JAPAN
There are many other lovely lakes in
Japan, Lake Hakone amongst them.
Those just mentioned are singled out
because they lie in the mountainous
district round Nikko, a region on the main
islands, to the north of Tokio, present-
ing, in their greatest beauty, character-
istic features of Japanese inland scenery
— imposing mountains, stately, venerable
trees, and grand waterfalls comparable to
those of Norway. The aspect of the
Japanese islands is, as may be inferred,
diversified, stern and rugged amidst the
dark forests of the north, smiling in the
sunlit regions further south, beautiful
almost everwhere.
The land is chiefly mountainous, the
ranges running from south-west to north
east, interspersed with smiling valleys,
fertile plains, chequered into regular
squares by the narrow, raised embank-
ments dividing the rice-fields, with, here
and there, wild, desolate moors in places
where even the untiring industry and
agricultural skill of the people could not
induce the stubborn ground to yield
427
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
hr^«,u«?te3iMja>i*ei«m«ni«i ..
t^z^si^
Looking over the Bay of 808 Islands
himset among the pine-clad rocks
A natural arch I lu; w Imr ( ,..
SCENES IN MATSUSHIMA BAY, JAPAN
sustenance. Where anything useful can
possibly be made to grow, the Japanese
grow it. Beside plants of utility, they
grow, to a greater extent than in any
other land, plants intended only for
pleasure, for the delight they give the
Japanese eye by their beauty.
In no other country are flowers so rever-
ently admired as in Japan ; nowhere are
they more skilfully grown and tended.
Every month has a special blossom, and
what may be termed its flower festival,
when the people, high and low, rich
and poor, go in their tens of thousands
to seek happiness in the contemplation
of Nature's most dehcate productions.
The plum-blossom appears about a month
after the New Year, and is followed by the
far-famed cherry-flower early in April,
when, in many ancient groves and on
many hillsides, the lightest of delicate
clouds, faintly pink, seem to have settled
on the trees.
No words can do justice to the exquisite
beauty of Japan in cherry-blossom time ;
it is then easily to be understood how dear
the flower of the cherry is to the Japanese
heart. To the people of Great Japan it is
the emblem of patriotism and of chivalry,
sharing their affections with the chry-
santhemum, the badge of the empire.
Other flowers grown to wonderful per-
fection are the peony, symbolical of
valour ; the graceful wistaria, the glow-
ing azalea, the slim-stalked iris, the
convolvulus, or " morning-glory," in many
strange forms, and the lotus, the sacred
flower of Buddhism. Besides these and
other cultivated flowers, Japan possesses
wild blossoms galore that fleck its plains
and valleys with colour. The leaves of
the maple turn, in November, to hues of
crimson and gold, clothing the woods with
a glory to be equalled only in Canada.
The natural beauty of Japan has un-
doubtedly fostered the aesthetic taste
inborn with the Japanese of all classes.
High and low, they admire and enjoy
intensely the lovely scenes amidst which
they dwell. This admiration and enjoy-
ment are strong incentives to their patriot-
ism. It seems to them that their beautiful
country must indeed be Kaini-no-Kuni,
" the Land of the Gods." To travelled
Occidentals, the scenery of Japan suggests,
in places, the Norwegian fjords ; in others,
the smiling shores of the Italian lakes; at
some points the coves of Devonshire, the
rocky coasts of the Channel Islands, or
428
THE EMPIRE OF THE EASTERN SEAS
the pleasant hills of Surrey. That these
impressions are correct is proved by the
fact that Japanese travellers who visit
any of these places never fail to recognise
their similarity to some favourite spot m
Japan.
The " backbone " of the southern halt
of the main island and of the whole island
of Shikoku consists of rock, principally
primitive gneiss and schists ; Kiu-shu,
Yezo and the northern half of the main
island are partly, the Kurile islands— Chi-
shima— entirely, volcanic. Subterranean
fires still smoulder in many parts of Japan,
many of the mountains being volcanoes,
not all of them extinct. Fuji, the glorious
cone so dear to the Japanese heart, uplift-
ing its peak 12. pS ft. from the surroundmg
plain, is a volcano that erupted last m
January, 1708. Fifty-one volcanoes, such
as Asama and Bandai-san in Eastern
Japan, Aso-san in Kiu-shu, Koma-ga-take
in Yezo, have been active in recent years,
some of them, especially Bandai-san, with
disastrous results. Nor do only volcanoes
threaten danger to the inhabitants of
Japan: earthquakes are frequent— about
500 shocks yearly— and sometimes ap-
palhngly destructive of life and property.
The great earthquake in the Gifu
region, in the central provinces of the main
island, on Octol)er 28th, 1891, wrecked
two po}uilous towns— Gifu and Ogaki —
completely destroyed two smaller ones—
Kasamatsu and Takegahana— killed alxnit
ten thousand people, and caused more
or less severe wounds to nearly twenty
thousand. In Japanese earthquakes, a
great part of the destruction arises from
the innumerable fires that break out when
the tiimsy houses— mostly of wood, with
paper partitions, in sliding frames, between
the rooms— collapse through the shock,
scattering the glowing charcoal from the
kitchens amidst heai)s of highly inflam-
mable materials. Earth-tremors bring not
only fiery ruin in their train ; they cause
at times upheavals of the sea that work
stupendous havoc. On the evening of
June T5th, 1896, the north-eastern coasts
of the main island were overwhelmed by a
so-called " tidal wave." The sea, impelled
probably by a seismic convulsion on the
bed of the Northern Pacific, rose in a
wave of towering height and, rushing
inland with terrific speed, engulfed whole
districts. More than 28,000 lives were
lost, and more than 17,000 people were
injured.
gateway of Miya- ima.a laiiiuus shinto shrine
1 he VS hllc Cu.
View of Fuii-yama across Motosu
THREE FAMOUS SCENES IN JAPAN
429
;.V./
'Hfffi^r /
^-
■iatu
J
'>-A.og:.,hr.
IT./,-,i7U.
East <'l' ^■■■■•<
//."
. fai pel
--N I /tAI WAJN
^ /tlM.rt.uJ ! CFoj-iI««)SI») ...
,c?
120
rr
^/„,ft,; :.J..,,T
MAP OF THE ISLAND EMPIRE OF JAPAN
432
JAPAN AND
ITS
PEOPLE— II
QUALITIES OF THE JAPANESE PEOPLE
IT is in presence of great calamities that
the best qualities of the Japanese
masses shine brilUantly. Their resignation,
their patient endurance, the al'iruism that
prompts them to mutual help and to
countless acts of kindness ; their self-sacri-
ficing bravery in the work of rescue, the
proud honesty with which they will con-
tent themselves with the barest pittance,
when relief is distributed, so that enough
may be left for others in greater need —
these are only some of the fine character-
istics of the wonderful islanders
whose achievements in recent
Wonderful ^-^^^^ ^^^^ earned the respect-
Islanders ^^^ admiration of the world,
even of their late foes. There is, of course,
another aspect of their character; they
are not without some of the vices and
failings human nature is heir to. An
attempt is made, later in these pages,
to describe their
moral and mental
characteristics, and
in so doing to
hold the scales im-
partially.
According to the
census of 1913 there
were 52,985423
subjects of the
Emperor of Japan
(excluding Korea),
and their number
is increasing steadily
and rapidly. The
number of males
exceeds that of
females by well-
nigh a million.
The population is
very dense in the
fertile regions, and
increases so rapidly
that emigration is absolutely necessary.
The masses are healthy and strong,
capable ot great endurance — a fact brought
into striking prominence by the achieve-
ments of the Japanese forces in the Arctic
winter of Manchuria, and in its torrid
28
A Race
of Little
People
THE RISING GENERATION
summer. The Japanese can, as a rule,
bear cold much better than heat. Living
thinly clad in unwarmed houses that offer
but little protection and are by day
draughty as bird-cages, they early become
inured to cold. The average physique of
the upper classes is by no means so good
as that of the manual workers, and is con-
siderably below the Occidental standards.
The Japanese are a black-haired race,
with smooth skins, varying in colour
through various yellowish shades, from
a hue of brown, in the case of
those working in the sun, to a
light tint no darker than that
of the Southern European, with
comparatively large skulls, prominent
cheek-bones, and a tendency to project-
ing jaws. They are of small stature, the
average height of the male being only
slightly over five feet (5*02 ft.), that of
the female slightly
over four feet si.x
inches (4"66 ft.). In
other words, the men
are of about the same
average stature as
European females,
the women propor-
tionately shorter.
There are, of
course, exceptions,
some Japanese being
of a height that
would cause them
to be considered
tall amongst Occi-
dentals ; but they
appear as giants
amongst their dimi-
nutive compatriots..
Both men and
women have small
hands and feet, those
...1 A I h.iciwuod
JAPAN
of the upper classes being beautifully
shaped. Even amongst manual workers
it is not rare to find, especially amongst
females, hands of an aristocratic type.
The shapely appearance of the feet is
often spoiled by thick ankles, probably
433
THE CHILDREN'S FESTIVAL: FEAST OF DOLLS IN A JAPANESE HOME
Japan is the land of love for children, and many quaint customs are observed for their sake. On the third day of the
third month in each year the Feast of Dolls is held in thousands of Japanese homes, and the day is one of great delight.
The Two
Types of
Japanese
directly
the result of wearing sandals. The black
hair is abundant on the head, straight
and coarse ; there is hardly any on the
arms, legs and chest. The eyelashes are
scanty, and grow immediately out of the
eyelids, without the " hem " that borders
the eyelids of Occidental races. The eyes
are dark, full in the broad-faced, plebeian
type, narrow in the aristocratic cast
of countenance. In the latter they are
generally set more or less obliquely,
their slanting appearance being
enhanced by the fact that the
aperture for the eye seems to
have been cut, as it were,
in the smooth skin, tightly
stretched over the upper part of the face,
not, as in the white races, in a very
marked depression under the brow.
There are two plainly distinct types in
the nation. The majority are " stocky,"
rather squat people, with broad, round
faces, rather thick hps and flat noses ;
the minority, of the aristocratic type,
are more slenderly built, with long oval
face and aquiline nose. In both types
the trunk is long as compared with the legs,
their shortness being probably due, in
some measure, to the national habit of
sitting on the floor, in a kneeling jiosture,
the weight of the body being thrown back
<;n to the heels. Sitting on benches, as
434
in school and in barracks, necessitated
by the introduction of Western educa-
tional and military methods, has some-
what improved the proportions of the
Japanese body in this respect. ■ The
admirable gymnastic training given in the
schools to children of both sexes, and,
still more, the naval or mihtary service
to which every able-bodied Japanese
adult male is liable, have done wonders
in improving the physique of the nation.
Statistics collected by the Army Medical
Department clearly show that the race
is gradually growing taller since the intro-
duction of universal service. The Japanese
grow to maturity more rapidly than
Occidentals ; they also age earlier. As
in other countries, very old
women are more numerous
than very aged men. Both
the slender, often weakly,
upi^er classes and the stout plebeians are
nimble in their movements, have supple
limbs and remarkal)ly skilful fingers.
The workers use their toes to hold and
steady the material on which they are at
work, often sitting at their labour where
Occidentals would stand. The great
toe is well separated from the others,
owing to the effect of the loop of cord
passing between them to secure the
sandal to the foot, the tabi, or sock, QJ
Physique
of (he
Nation
QUALITIES OF THE JAPANESE PEOPLE
cotton-cloth being made with a separate
compartment for the great toe. The skin
of the whole body is generally of satin-
like smoothness, owing, no doubt, to the
very hot baths — at a temperature of
about 110° F. — in which all Japanese
indulge at least once a dav,
Cleanest ^j^^^^ maintaining their well-
Nation in , J . " • ,,
. y. . . deserved reputation as the
cleanest nation in the world.
To the Occidental eye, the majority of
Japanese men are not comely, although
there are notable exceptions, presenting
fine faces, of noble and intellectual type.
The women are often very pretty, judged
by the Occidental standard ; they are
nearly always graceful and charming,
owing to their exquisite manners and
gentle voice. The chief element in. their
charm is undoubtedly their perfect
femininity. There is absolutely nothing
masculine about their ways or their
speech, yet, when the need arises, they
are capable of courage and self-sacrifice
that places them on the same high
level as their heroic fellow-countrymen.
It may safely be asserted that there
are no more dutiful wives, no better
mothers. There are certainly no daughters
with a greater sense of filial piety, a
virtue that forms the basis of family life
in Japan.
Throughout the Far East the whole social
fabric is based on the family ; the whole
state is, indeed, considered as one great
family, with the Emjieror at its head. It is
the mothers who train Japanese children
from infancy in the spirit of reverence and
obedience to parents and elders in the
family circle, and to the Emperor as the
supreme chief of the great national
family. And well do the children assimi-
late the lessons of obedience and devotion
so carefully inculcated by the mother,
for there are none more docile than the
boys and girls of Japan, whose respectful,
courteous manners, not only towards
their parents, but towards elder brothers
and sisters, earn the admiration of Occi-
dentals. The chief qualities of the Japanese
race are patriotism —which
is, with them, synonymous
with loyalty — courage, filial
piety, and cleanliness. In
love of country, in self-sacrifice for the
common weal, in loyalty to the sovereign
— with them a cult — in reckless gallantry,
and in bodily cleanliness, the Japanese
surpass all other nations of our time. It
may be truly said that patriotism is their
The Chief
Qualities of
the Race
THE VARIOUS GRADES OF SOCIETY IN OLD JAPAN
Society in Old Japan was based on the principle tliat tlie producer was worthy of high honour. There were four
great classes. At the top were the Shi, the nobility and gentry, warriors, administrators, and scholars. Next were the
No, the agricultural class ; thirdly came the Ko, craftsmen and artists ; and at the bottom were the Sho, traders and
bankers. Some of the wealthier classes were thus at the bottom, because they were not producers but only circulators.
435
The Royal Mail in Old Japan
LIFE AND WORK IN OLD JAPAN: SOME TYPES IN THE ANCIENT CAPITAL
436
Lady in walking costume
— ^ i-aoy in waiKinf
SOME TYPES IN OLD JAPAN: CHIEFLY DEPICTED BY NATIVE ARTISTS
437
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
WINTER
JAPAN
JAPANESE ARTIST
real religion ; it inspires their magnificent
courage in war, on land and sea ; it
supplies the incentive of their lives in
times of peace, all merely personal con-
siderations being subordinate to this
passionate national feeling.
The people of Japan are distinguished,
besides, by quick intelligence, a remark-
able power of observation — derived, no
doubt, from their close study of Nature,
of which they are devoted lovers — by a
mastery of detail, and a very retentive
memory, fostered by the system of learn-
ing by rote imported from China, together
with the writing by means of ideographic
signs, necessitating the memorising of
thousands of characters standing for
words. In politeness they stand first
amongst the nations, every incident of
life being attended by strictly-defined
rules of social etiquette, observed by all,
not only, as in Occidental countries,
by the more highly educated classes.
Their courtesy, though often degenerating
4J8
into mere hollow formality, is
based on a kindly regard for the
feelings of others, a generous
altruism and a consequent depre-
ciation of self. They are hospitable
and open-handed, the giving of pre-
sents attending numerous festivals
and many occasions in social Hfe.
Schooled from babyhood by the
rules of their rigid etiquette, Japan-
ese, young and old, of all classes,
are remarkably quiet in their de-
meanour, the higher ranks being
extremely dignified in manner, and
completely concealing their feelings
under an imperturbable mask.
They bear pain, both physical and
mental, with Spartan stoicism, their
nerves being much less easily ex-
cited than those of Occidentals, so
that they have often been described
as " a nation without nerves."
Their apparent contempt for death
arises chiefly from the fact that, to
most of them, the passing out of
this world does not imply a total
severance from mundane interests,
their general belief being that the
spirits of the departed have cogni-
sance of the doings of those they
leave behind. This idea, insepar-
able from the ancestor-worship that
has prevailed amongst them from
time immemorial, and still prevails,
was well exemplified in their great
struggle with Russia, their forces being
buoyed up by the conviction that the
spirits of all the warriors who had died
for Japan were fighting side by side with
their gallant successors.
The lov^e of the beautiful in Nature,
common to all members of the Japanese
race, is probably one of the chief factors
in the artistic feeling so highly developed
among all classes. Their appreciation of
beauty of form and colour, their exquisite
sense of appropriateness in decoration,
the delicate restraint so evident
xlste of the ^" ^^^^ productions of their
*^ * ° wonderfully skilful, patient
** "* * artist-craftsmen, are too well
known to require more than passing
mention. Even their commonest house-
hold utensils are beautiful in shape, elegant,
and well adapted to their purpose. Their
innate good taste has added a delicate re-
finement to the vigorous art they received,
in early times, from China, chiefly by
way of Korea. Their aesthetic perception
QUALITIES OF THE JAPANESE PEOPLE
enables even the poorest Japanese
to derive intense pleasure from the
contemplation of the beautiful,
thus providing them with many
delights unknown to the vast
majority of modern Occidentals.
Combined with the simplicity and
frugality of their lives, and with
their naturally contented spirit, it
would seem to have enabled the
Japanese to solve the great problem
" how to be happy, though poor."
A nation possessing, to a high
degree, the virtues and qualities
just enumerated would appear to
be living in a perfect Utopia.
There is, however, shade in the
picture as well as bright light. This
happy, contented, smiling people,
pre-eminent in domestic virtues,
industrious, fond of learning, easily
governed, gentle in manners and
speech, capable of rising, in
moments of national emergency,
to admirable heights of patriotic
heroism and self-sacrifice, is, after
all, human, and consequently
tainted with some of the vices and
many of the defects inherent in
human nature. The defects of the
Japanese character are, to a great
extent, inseparable from their very
virtues and good qualities in their
extreme manifestations. Their in-
tense patriotism is the cause of the
LADY AT HER TOILET : BY A JAPANESE ARTIST
anti-foreign spirit still, unfortunately, rife
amongst them. Their country is to them
" the Land of the Gods," their riation the
Elect People, living under the special
protection of Heaven, whose blessings are
transmitted to them by the benevolence of a
superhuman sovereign, directly descended,
in unbroken line, from the Sun Goddess.
With this belief firmly rooted in the
minds of the great majority of the people,
it is no wonder that all those who have
not the good fortune to be born Japanese
appear to them not only as
a lona foreigners, but as Gentiles.
Pride of the T,, ^ . , ' r -KJ T
, Ihe statesmen of New lapan
Japanese , . ,, . ^ '
are profuse in their assurances
that it is the desire of their people to
form a unit, on terms of equality, in
the great family of nations.
This assurance is echoed by many
Japanese writers ; it is in accordance
with the spirit of the tolerant, all-embrac-
ing, gentle Buddhist faith, brimming over
with sympathy for all living creatures ;
it is also in agreement with the calm,
placid tenets of the Chinese philosophy
that, with Buddhism, has to such a great
extent moulded the thought of Japan.
Yet those statesmen and writers know
full well that in this respect neither
Buddhism, nor Chinese philosophy, nor
the cosmopolitan spirit of the middle
period of the nineteenth century, nor
the brotherhood of man inculcated by
true Christianity, has succeeded, to any
appreciable degree, in causing the Japanese
to look upon foreigners as brothers, or
even on the same plane with their own
heaven-descended race.
The reckless bravery of the Japanese,
their contempt for death, are closely
related to the slight value they set upon
human life and to the national delight
in tales of bloodshed. Co-existent with
the mildness of their manners and the
placid tenor of their domestic life,
there is found, deep in Japanese hearts,
a wild delight in carnage, the legacy,
439
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
JAPANESE ON A PILGRIMAGE
naturally most cherished amongst those
of the warrior class, of centuries of
internecine warfare. The sword, " the
living soul of the Samurai," is still held in
reverence as the instrument not only of
national defence against the foreign foe,
'but of vengeance and of the chastisement
of one looked upon by the wielder of the
weapon as an enemy to the State. Hence
the indulgence with which political
assassination is still regarded by the
masses in Japan. As the brutal instincts,
inherited from primeval ancestors, often
become manifest in an English-speaking
crowd watching a football match or a
boxing contest, so, in Japan, the old
savagery reveals itself, time and again, at
fencing bouts, the excited cries of the
combatants recalling the bad, wild days
of yore.
This fierce spirit seems incompatible
with the noble generosity towards prisoners
of war, and the tender care of the enemy's
wounded and sick, that redounded to the
glory of the Japanese in both their great
struggles in our time, the wars against
China and against Russia. It is difficult
to believe that savagery can survive in
the breasts of people capable of organising
such an admirable institution as the Red
Cross Society of Japan, whose noble work,
in war and peace, is one of the chief glories
of New Japan ; but it must be remem-
440
bered that the young Great Power still
feels itself to be undergoing probation
under the eyes of an observant and critical
world. The natural instinct of the Japan-
ese warrior would lead him utterly to
destroy the foe who dared to oppose his
Emperor's will, and it requires the appli-
cation of the most severe discipline to
make him understand that on his exercise
of humane forbearance to the vanquished
depends, to a great extent, his nation's
good repute among the Powers.
This desire to stand well in the opinion
of foreign nations has been so thoroughly
inculcated in the people of New Japan
that every individual brought into contact
with foreigners beyond 'the boundaries of
his native land feels that the honour of
Japan is dependent on his behaviour,
even in minute particulars. Hence the
high reputation for excellent conduct
enjoyed by Japanese students and others
residing, or travelling, abroad.
The altruism and self-effacement, born
of the family system, fostered by the
division of the nation into clans — now
officially abohshed, but still binding huge
groups of families with strong ties — and
culminating in the most complete devo-
tion to the head of the national family,
the Emperor, are the causes of a peculiar
defect in the Japanese character — the
lack of individualitv. Tt may be said of
A FISH HAWKER IN JAPAN
QUALITIES OF THE JAPAJ^SE PEOPLE
the Japanese that, on most important
matters, they feel and think by milhons.
The whole system of their civilisation
tends to make individual effort subser-
vient to the common cause ; the reverence
and obedience inculcated from early
childhood are not likely to develop the
spirit of individuality. Hence the wonder-
ful facility with which the Japanese
combine to carry out any policy they
recognise as needful for the public welfare
once that course has been clearly indicated
by their trusted leaders
as one that has the
Emperor's approval.
Japan is, for this
reason, the land where
leagues, unions, guilds,
trusts and "combines"
work with astonishing
efficiency, such institu-
tions being, by their very
nature, well suited to
the national character.
There are, of course,
exceptional Japanese
who chafe under the re-
pression of their strong
individuality; these occa-
sionally break through
the national custom and
strike out an indepen-
dent line. Their fate is
not encouraging to those
who might be tempted
to follow their example.
Public opinion reproves
them, and they are soon
made to feel that their
conduct is looked upon
as anti-national. Those amongst them who
will not bow their heads to the popular
verdict, and refuse to be reduced to the
level at which the nation strives to keep
the individual, soon find life in their own
country unbearable. In various cities of
Europe, still more in those of North
America, such Japanese individualists may
be found living in self-imposed exile,
shunned by their compatriots, until the
day, which comes to most of them, when
they submit and go home to resume their
place in the ranks of a nation that abhors
eccentricity and expects every man to fit
into his proper groove in the great national
machine.
The mental activity of the Japanese,
their respect for knowledge and for all
intellectual pursuits, causing them to
A PEASANT IN
(Made of
admire keen wits and exercise of brain-
power, have probably contributed in a
large measure to form one of the traits
in their character that is repellant to
Occidentals — their inclination to be cun-
ning and deceitful. In spite of the high
and pure ideals of their chivalry, they
have not our loathing for deceit, our con-
tempt for chicanery, our respect for the
truth. A Japanese convicted of an untruth
merely conceals his annoyance at being
found out by a smile, sometimes by a
laugh, and is not deterred
rom another statement
at variance with facts
should he consider it use-
ful to make one. Low cun-
ning is frequently looked
ujion as cleverness ; the
suppression of facts is so
common that there is
no other country where
it is so difficult to arrive at
the truth. The national
failing of intense secre-
tiveness arises, no doubt,
from the suspicious
nature of the people, who
distrust not only all
foreigners, but even most
of their own race — a con-
dition of mind due, to a
great extent, to the
widely^ ramified system
of spying that flourished
during the rule of the
Tokugawa Shoguns, and
still exists to a lesser
degree.
Their infinite capacity
for attention to the most minute details
leads to a certain pettiness, a disinclination
to consider great abstract questions, and,
consequently, to a narrowness of view that
accounts for some of the blunders which
occur in the execution of the otherwise
marvellously efficient policy of the rulers
of Japan.
The exquisite pohteness of the Japanese
is responsible for a great part of that
insincerity with which they are taxed by
Occidentals who have been much in'
contact with them. This extreme courtesy
makes them so anxious to avoid any s})eech
that might possibly give offence that they
frequently distort the truth, suppress it
entirely, or replace it by pohte fiction,
intended to give pleasure. It should be
remembered that, in the knightly times of
441
A RAI.M CLOAK
straw.)
THE END OF A JAPANESE FEAST: BRINGING IN THE SEA-BREAM
old — they continued until the early 'seven-
ties of the nineteenth century— a Japanese
had to be very guarded in his speech and
demeanour ; quite unintentionally, a word
lightly sf)oken, an incautious gesture,
might give dire offence to a Samurai — one
of the gentry, privileged to wear two
swords — who would be quick to resent the
fancied slight to his punctilious sense of
personal dignity. Insults, real, and often
imaginary, were wiped out with blood.
-- , Hence the endeavour to avoid
Manners of -< i /■ fc
.1. u u. ^iny possible cause of offence,
the Haughty f -^ .f iU x j
„ . lor the same reason that made
Samurai _
Europeans very circumspect in
their behaviour in the days when gentle-
men wore swords and drew them on
small provocation.
To such a pitch was punctilio carried
amongst Japanese gentlemen until quite
recent times that they preferred death,
inflicted by their own hands in the most
painful manner — by self-disembowelment,
or hara-kiri, more elegantly termed sep-
puku, or " self-immolation " — to living with
a stain on their honour, such stain being
often merely inability to disprove a slander-
ous imputation. To this day, the Japanese
remain the most acutely sensitive people on
the point of honour ; so " touchy " are they
that friendly intercourse with Occidentals
is thereby rendered extremely difficult.
442
What places an additional bar to perfect
cordiality in such relations is the deplor-
able fact that an Occidental may un-
wittingly give grave offence to a Japanese
without the latter giving any sign of dis-
pleasure at the time. Allowance is seldom
made for the perfectly unintentional error
on the part of the offender, whilst the
grievance is allowed to rankle, is rarely
forgiven, and never forgotten. Where an
Occidental would certainly call his friend's
attention to the fact that he was dis-
pleased by some remark or action that
would, no doubt, be promptly atoned for
by a sincere apology, thus terminating the
incident, the Japanese says nothing. He
nurses his resentment, sometimes for
years, until a fitting opportunity presents
itself to avenge the real, or fancied, wound
to his feelings by some particularly un-
pleasant action directed against the Occi-
dental, all unconscious of his offence.
This unfortunate peculiarity of the
Japanese character is the outcome of two
main currents that run through the
national temperament — the spirit of se-
crecy, already alluded to, and the thirst
for revenge. The latter, possibly due to
the strain of Malay blood in the much-
mixed Japanese race, is one of the chief
stumbling-blocks hindering the introduc-
tion of Christianity, and has prevented
QUALITIES OF THF JAPANESE PEOPLE
Buddhism, also a religion teaching meek-
ness, from obtaining a complete hold on the
people. In its petty forms, this spirit of
long-cherished spite is merely annoying ;
in its extreme manifestations it becomes
exceedingly dangerous.
It may be thought that the admirable
magnanimity displayed by the Japanese
towards the vanquished in their wars
with China and with Russia affords evi-
dence that the old spirit of revenge
is dying out. Unfortunately, it is as
strong as ever, the explanation of the
apparent anomaly being that, in both
cases, the foe was vanquished, and thus
became, according to the principles of
Japanese chivalry, an object for mercy
and compassion. As long as the opponent
resists, or refuses to surrender at the mercy
of the conqueror, he is implacably at-
tacked ; the moment he has, metaphoric-
ally speaking, grovelled and placed the
victor's foot on his head, he is raised from
the ground and treated with the greatest
consideration.
This applies not only to warfare, but
to those incidents in civil hfe, already
alluded to, in which a Japanese considers
himself aggrieved, especially when the
offender is a foreigner. In such case'-,
humble apology for the slight, however
unintentional — in fact, an attitude amount-
ing to " I do not know what I have done
to offend ; but, in any case, I own I am
in the wrong, and promise, with sincere
apologies, not to offend again; deal
with me as you think fit," would generally
ensure the restoration of good relations,
provided the apology be sufficiently public
to gratify the self-esteem of the Japanese.
It is hardly to be expected that a
self-respecting Occidental would demean
himself thus to atone for an error un-
consciously committed.
Defects of • Japanese self-esteem has just
Japanese ^^^^ mentioned ; it often be-
Character ^^^^^ insufferable arrogance,
showing plainly, through a cloak of false
modesty, " the pride that apes humihty."
This arrogance, displayed chiefly towards
foreigners, but also by Japanese in official
positions towards their fellow-countrymen
of inferior rank, is intimately connected
with another national failing, excessive
vanity. It is less noticeable amongst
sailors and soldiers than amongst civil
officials of corresponding rank.
Minor failings of the Japanese are
jealousy, envy of those who achieve
success, and, connected with these faults,
A GROUP OF CIVIL AND MILITARY OFFICIALS IN OLD JAPAN
443
STREET SCENE IN
a great love of gossip and a readiness to
listen to slander, or to disseminate it.
There are, finally, two charges to be
examined that are frequently levelled at
the Japanese by those who profess to
know them well — the accusations of
immorality, sexual and commercial. The
first of these charges may be disposed of
by the statement that the Japanese are
about as moral in their sexual relations
as the Latin nations of Europe, with the
advantage slightly in favour of the
Japanese. What has given them an evil
repute in this respect is, probably, the
fact that they consider as natural, and
treat accordingly, certain evils that the
Northern Occidental peoples affect to
ignore. The natural, simple life led by
the vast majority of Japanese pre-
disposes them to take a natural, sensible
view of matters that the less primitive
conditions of Western civilisation have
imbued with an objectionable
significance. They see, for in-
stance, no harm in nudity
where it is unavoidable, as in
bathing, or convenient, as in the perform-
ance of hard work in hot weather. A
Japanese woman will feel no shame at being
seen naked when entering or leaving the
daily bath, but would strongly object to
what she would consider the gross im-
modesty of exposing a considerable surface
of her body in Occidental evening dress.
444
Japanese
Ideas of
Modesty
VILLAGE OF OLD JAPAN
In the first case, the nudity is looked upon
as quite natural ; in the second, as useless
and provocative of pruriency.
As to the commercial morality of the
Japanese, it is necessary to observe the
great difference that exists between the
position, in this respect, of Japanese
State institutions, financial and commercial
-. . corporations, and firms of the
„ . first rank on the one hand.
Honour m j j.i . r i. j
^ and the great mass of traders
Commerce ,, ",, ~, y • ,
on the other, ihe Imperial
Japanese Government, municipal corpora-
tions, and the great financial institutions
and industrial and commercial associa-
tions under State control (such as subsi-
dised steamship companies), have always
met their obligations with scrupulous
fidelity and are likely to continue to do so.
With them the national honour is con-
sidered at stake ; it is certain that the
last Japanese will part with his last
garment sooner than involve the national
credit in disgrace by failure to meet the
nation's engagements towards the foreign
creditor.
It is, unfortunately, quite otherwise in
the case of the great bulk of the trading
classes. There are, in Japan, a number of
first-class firms, some of them established
for centuries, whose reputation is above
reproach; but between these and the
majority of the merchants a great gulf is
fixed. It must be remembered that, until
IN THE OUTSKIRTS OF YEDO. NOW TOKIO, THE CAPITAL OF JAPAN
the beginning of the New Era, in the early
'seventies of the nineteenth century, the
trading community formed the lowest of
the four classes, then sharply and immut-
ably divided one from the other, com-
posing that part of the Japanese nation
P that had full civil rights (below
_,."_, them stood only the Eta, who
Old Class J 1 • J
^. . . carried on despised occupa-
Divisions ,. , . ^ . . T
tions, involving contamination
by contact with dead bodies, human or
animal, and the outcast Hi-nin).
The nation was divided into Shi, the
nobility and gentry, the mihtary, scholarly
and administrative class ; No, the agri-
culturists ; Ko, the craftsmen, with whom
the artists were counted ; and Sho, the
traders, placed below farmers and handi-
craftsmen as non-producers.
The natural consequence of this low
place in the social scale was a lack of self-
respect on the part of those engaged in
commerce and finance that led them to
be unmindful of their good repute. Trade
and finance were looked upon by the
majority as occupations unworthy of a
gentleman and beneath the callings
of the peasant and the workman ; every
trick was considered excusable when
practised by the merchant, whose whole
business was looked upon as a sort of
warfare, in which cunning stratagem could
be legitimately employed to the end of
personal gain, a purpose appearing most
unworthy to the classes swayed by the old
knightly spirit. The evil effects, on a class
as on an individual, of a bad reputation
and consequent public contempt have,
unfortunately, outlived the abolition of
the old social divisions. The Japanese
merchants and bankers no longer form a
separate and despised class ; the gentry,
even members of the aristocracy, are
engaging every day more and more in
financial, industrial and commercial pur-
suits, many of them with marked success,
yet the old taint adheres to the bulk of
the trading community.
There are, of course, many strictly
honourable dealers in Japan, even
amongst the smaller tradespeople and
retailers. It is amongst the wholesale
merchants and the brokers that lapses
from the straight path of commercial
integrity are still frequent, especially
in their dealings with foreigners. It
is, unfortunately, still the case that an
advantage gained over the foreigner, even
_^ _ . by the most shady methods.
The Desire • i i i ■
, _ . . ,^ IS looked upon as, in some
to Trick the ,- ' i • . i-i ■
_. . way, a national victory. 1 his
Foreigner j i , i • , r •
deplorable point of view is
likely to prevail as long as Japanese
nationalism exists in its extreme form.
The Japanese Government has, time
after time, loudly proclaimed, by the
mouths of its statesmen at home, and
its representatives abroad, its desire to
445
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
facilitate, in every way, the introduction
of foreign capital, the vital influence so
urgently required for the realisation of
Japan's bold schemes of industrial and
commercial development. Strange to say,
this cordial invitation, though energetic-
ally responded to by the capitalists of
Europe, especially of Britain, and by those
of America, has not, as yet, led
apanese ^^ ^j^^ investment of any very
National j i_i • t
r- considerable sums m apan-
ese enterprises, although, as is
well-known, the Japanese Government
has easily borrowed many millions sterling
in London, New York and Paris, for
purposes of State. The chief obstacle to
the investment on a large scale, of
foreign capital in Japanese enterprises is
to be found in the fact that, forgetting
that capital is, after all, a commodity,
therefore subject to the laws of suppl)'
and demand, the Japanese financial and
industrial classes do not realise that tlie
capitalist, being virtually the seller, con-
trols the price of his property.
A mistaken impression appears to
prevail in Japan that foreign capital is
obliged to find an outlet in the Empire of
the Rising Sun and must, therefore,
submit to such conditions as may seem
suitable to the Japanese and accept such
security as the Japanese may deem
sufficient. As long as this erroneous view
obtains, there can be no considerable
influx of foreign money into the coffers
of Japanese industrial and commercial
concerns. Experience is proverbially the
best teacher ; the dearth of funds that is
certain to follow, in due time, the abnormal
and feverish activity which is animating
Japanese economic conditions, immediately
after the successful issue of the great
struggle with Russia, will undoubtedly
induce a more reasonable appreciation of
the circumstances. Once the Japanese
have been taught by experience that they
must regulate their demands by the lowest
. terms considered acceptable
^ ^,..?"*, by the foreign holders of
Qualities of -^ •. , . j r. ui
^. . capital, a vast and profitable
the Japanese ^ I i n i- u r iu
field will he Defore those
Occidental capitalists who have the ad-
vantage of expert advice in their selection
of Japanese investments.
As a general rule, it may be stated that
intercourse with the people of Japan
leaves Occidentals very favourably im-
pressed with the social qualities of the
inhabitants of the island empire. Their
446
exquisite courtesy, their gentle manners,
and the thousand ways in which they
demonstrate that kindness of heart that
lubricates the wheels of life's machinery
all tend to make ordinary, everyday
relations with Japanese a delightful ex-
perience. It is only when the more
serious aspects of life are approached that
the Occidental begins to feel the wide
divergence between his point of view, in
nearly every important matter, and that
of the Japanese.
It is exceedingly difficult to specify
with exactitude the particular feature
of the Japanese character which lies
at the root of the unfortunate fact
that nearly all Occidentals who have
had serious dealings with the people of
Dai Nippon have emerged from their
experience exasperated and often dis-
gusted. It is probable that want of
candour is the trait that acts as the
sharpest irritant, for it must be confessed
that frankness, so highly prized by
Occidentals, especially by those of the
nations that " push the world along," is
neither appreciated at its true value nor
generally practised by the J apa-
f^ih ^^^ nese. The very nature of their
J ^ elaborate courtesy makes them
apancs shrink from that bluff frank-
ness which obtains amongst Occidentals
on a footing of intimate friendship. Even
the Japanese mode of speech is a
hindrance to direct statement of fact ;
a Japanese, asked if he has ever been in
England, will reply, in his own tongue,
" Yes," and, after a pause, " I have nevey
visited England." He would not deem it
polite to shock his questioner by a direct
negative !
Another peculiarity of the Japanese
character, that is apt to loom large in
Occidental eyes as a grave national
failing, is the lack of the spirit of grati-
tude, as it is understood by the white
races. The Japanese have, hitherto, never
failed to deal out fair measure, according
to the letter of the contract, to the
numerous Occidentals whom they have
employed, as advisers and instructors, in
adapting Western civilisation to the
material needs of their re-organised
empire ; their labours, as well as those
of friends of Japan who have rendered
voluntary, unpaid services, have also been
recognised by the bestowal of marks of
Imperial favour ; but it is doubtful whether
a real feeling of what we term gratitude
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
TYPICAL JAPANESE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS
has ever entered the hearts of the nation
towards the many distinguished men who
have given of their best to assist in the
making of New Japan, or to spread a
knowledge of its greatness. This doubt does
not apply to the Navy and Army ; those
gallant forces, keeping the sacred fire of
chivalry alight, show deep gratitude to
the British
sailors and
European sol-
diers — French
and, after
them, Ger-
mans— who in-
structed them
in the modern
art of war.
Sy m pa thy
with their as-
jiirations is, of
course, cordi-
ally welcomed
from every ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^m^^^^&M^M^::^^"'^
quarter by the
Japanese; they
are delighted to receive help of any kind
from Occidental friends at such times as,
in their view, render such assistance or
sympathy necessary. When the occasion
has passed, and they feel independent of
foreign support, they not only cease to
make any effort to attract, but take no
pains to conceal their indifference to it.
This attitude, induced by the severely
practical nature of their policy, is repug-
nant to Occidental feeling, and has caused
the accusation to be brought against the
Japanese that they treat their foreign
friends "like lemons, to be thrown away
once the juice has been squeezed out of
them."
This course of conduct should not be
judged too harshly; it should be remem-
bered that such a proud, hypersensitive
nation is ever desirous of displaying its
independence, and is consequently averse
to appearing to sohcit help or sympathy
from the outside. A gifted Frenchman,
a true friend of Japan, the late Felix
Regamey, several of whose spirited pictures
-J
of Japan are reproduced in this History,
and who did much to gain sympathy
for that country amongst his compatriots
at a time when they were little inclined
to extend it, said to the writer : " It would,
indeed, be a pleasure to help the Japanese,
but they will not let one help them."
It is noticeable that this coolness to-
wards foreign
sympathy is
usually coinci-
dent with a
period of na-
tional elation,
consequent on
the victory of
Japanese arms,
or the obtain-
ing of some
solid advan-
tage by Japan-
ese diplomacy.
Reviewing
impartially the
good and the
bad points of
the Japanese national character, one must
come to the comforting conclusion that its
faults are likely to disappear, or, at least,
to be considerably attenuated in the future,
as Japan enters more and more into the
active life of the family of nations. The
pressure of the public opinion of the
vast majority of civilised mankind must
exercise a beneficial influence in bring-
ing the Japanese gradually into line
with ourselves where the points of view
are still too widely divergent to admit
of cordial co-operation between them
and Occidentals. The virtues now pre-
eminently Japanese may, indeed probably
will, suffer to a certain extent in the
process ; it is the writer's firm conviction
that enough of them will remain to
enable the Japanese to accomplish the
glorious destiny towards which they are
marching. Their patriotism, their valour,
their thoroughness, their wisdom in
matters of national moment, are of the
virtues that make nations great.
Arthur Diosy
-^^ .^ ^'
448
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